Network design using Cisco components

[christianwahl]

My name is Christian, I'm administrating several networks onboard our navy fleet and we are searching for a new solution connecting the ships.

The following settings are given.

1. The ships are connected to homebase with different transmission routes (e.g SATCOM (2 MBit/s, 400 ms), SATCOM (128 Kbit/s, 800 ms), 4G (up to 100 MBi/s, 50 ms), leased line in harbour (1000 Mbit/s, 20 ms), STARLINK in future.....

2. The ships have several crypted networks (from 4 to 10) onboard (IPSEC tunnel to homebase with empty TOS Bit )(there are problems with QoS)

3. Up to now the ships are establishing GRE tunnel (with IPSEC) on all different transmission routes using "Hello" packets and the connections with the least cost will be used exclusively. (Two IPSEC header due to double encryption)

4. If the "best" route will fail, the next best will take over

5. In future the user onboard should be able to determine, which network should go over which transmission route, for 

distribution on the whole available bandwith (e.g. different SATCOM Channel with different Bandwith, Jitter tost of packets, transmisson time ...)

My question,

A. What technologie is useable for that settings ? (MPLS Auto-tunnel, policy based routing, ...)

B. Is there a solution, were the need of router config is only given onboard, not ashore ? (auto-tunnel with costs?) to produce a tool where it can be selected which network is to use and change only one site of the connectio, not to have the problem changing the settings withot having connection to the homebase.

Thanks in advance

[marce1000]

 - You may find this particular customer-case , and  implementation document useful :

             https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/ios-nx-os-software/performance-routing-pfr/c36_730837_atea_shipping_cs_final.pdf

 M.

[christianwahl]

Is it possible to get an example of the router config ?

[paul driver]

Hello
Sounds like you would require a feature such a performance routing - PfR (use to be call Optimize Edge Routing -OER) in which the concept is that as/when a certain link reaches a defined network/application utilization/performance value traffic would be automatically re-routed over an alternative link -Cisco PrF

[Joseph W. Doherty]

As the other posters have already suggested, you might want to investigate Cisco's PfR.

My experience is dated, having used OEM, also mentioned by @paul driver, when it first was released, and the first PfR version.

That noted, PfR technology has many features, such as dynamic load balancing across all paths concurrently (of dissimilar bandwidths), rerouting (rather quickly) around poor end-to-end performance (or failed paths that routing might not detect), managing flows vis-a-vis path performance based on ToS, and more.

I don't have any example router configs, but unsure how much that would assist you as configs vary (much) on your PfR environment and how many of its features you're using.

Paul's link is a great place to start to acquire PfR information.  @marce1000's reference seems great too, as it seems to address a civilian maritime need somewhat similar to yours.