Performance evaluation of the Cognitive Packet Network in the presence of network worms

Reliable networks that provide good service quality are expected to become
more crucial in every aspect of communication, especially as the information
transferred between network users gets more complex and demanding and
as malicious users try to deliberately degrade or altogether deny legitimate
network service. The Cognitive Packet Network (CPN) routing protocol provides
Quality of Service (QoS) driven routing and performs self-improvement
in a distributed manner, by learning from the experience of special packets,
which gather on-line QoS measurements and discover new routes. Although
CPN is generally very resilient to network changes, it may suffer worse performance
during node failures caused by network threats, such as network
worms. Here we evaluate the performance of CPN in such crises and compare
it with the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol, an industry
standard and widely used in Internet Protocol networks. We also improve
it by introducing a failure detection element that reduces packet loss and
delay during failures. Our experiments were performed in a real networking
testbed.