Adaptive Resilience of the Cognitive Packet Network in the Presence of Network Worms

Network worms are malicious self-replicating applications that propagate in a network by infecting node after node. They can cause significant damage by reducing the system performance or totaly disabling nodes, which results into considerable degradation of the qual- ity of service (QoS) that the users experience. The Cognitive Packet Net- work (CPN) is an adaptive routing protocol that attempts to address the QoS requirements of the network’s users by routing their traffic accord- ing to them. Although it is generally very resilient to network changes, it may suffer worse performance during a worm attack. Here we evaluate its performance in such crises and compare it with the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol, the current industry standard and widely used in Internet Protocol networks. Then we improve it by in- troducing a failure detection element that reduces packet loss and delay during failures. Our experiments were performed in a large networking testbed