VRRP-Based WAN Redundancy Protocol for Dual Gateway Cable Based Tsunameter (INA-CBT)

In the new development of the Indonesia cable-based tsunameter (INA-CBT), a double landing stations (LS) configuration will be implemented. Along with this new configuration, there is a necessity for a WAN redundancy protocol to fully draw its potential. The common approach is by using the first-hop redundancy protocol (FHRP) family, and in this research, virtual router redundancy protocol (VRRP) is used. In the basic VRRP protocol, the mechanism to do a failover that is triggered by a wide area network (WAN) connectivity failure is not supported. Therefore in this paper, we combine the basic VRRP protocol with a Netwatch feature on RouterOS Mikrotik to answer the new INA-CBT technical challenge for a WAN redundancy protocol. The VRRP configuration is implemented on a virtual test bed that resembles the new development of INACBT network topology. In addition, real link latency and packet loss quality of service (QoS) metrics of INA-CBT Labuanbajo optical and satellite links were simulated in this testbed by using a network software emulator named GNS3. We evaluated the WAN redundancy protocol performance by measuring failover time, failback time, and downtime experience by the landing station. In each measurement, three test parameters were varied to know the impact of each parameter on the performance. We discover from this test that ping and advertisement interval significantly impact performance, but link latency impact is negligible. For all of the test parameter values that were used, The performance complies with the criteria of INA-CBT data transmission requirements that it must be less than 6 minutes, even in our worst configuration parameter. As for the best performance, we got a downtime value of 2.88 s.