Segment Routing Based Traffic Scheduling for the Software-Defined Airborne Backbone Network

With the ubiquitous use of networking technologies in the military domain, network-centric warfare, which aims at improving the system of systems (SoS) capability, is a no-way-back trend of military development. Recently, it has become increasingly important to construct an airborne backbone network (ABN) to maintain coverage and provide reach-back to military units because the terrestrial networks cannot be flexibly deployed and have poor survivability. Given the advantages of software-defined networking (SDN), a software-defined airborne backbone network architecture (SD-ABN) is proposed for the ABN to ensure network flexibility, openness, interoperability, and evolvability. To meet the challenges of traffic management in SD-ABN, segment routing (SR) is applied with some practical modifications for the SD-ABN. Moreover, a network traffic scheduling algorithm termed MRP-TS is designed based on SD-ABN to improve the transmission reliability and bandwidth utilization by balancing network traffic to multiple reliable transmission paths. Relevant theories have been proposed and proved to illustrate the correctness of the algorithm. The network simulation experiments have been conducted using the network simulator EXata 5.1, and the simulation results validate the effectiveness of our proposals.