A Self-Healing Multipath Routing Protocol

This paper introduces a self-healing multipath routing solution that is resilient to code knock-out attacks i.e., the software copes with changing network topologies and perturbations of link characteristics as well as loss of parts of its code base. We use the Fraglets artificial chemistry for building a distributed reaction network that spans the whole network topology. Unlike the use of explicit metric values in today’s network protocols, our approach relies on the concentration of routing table entries to stochastically decide which path a packet should take through the network. A reinforcement mechanism rewards successful forwarding rules that compete against each other for delivering data packets over alternative paths. Our self-healing solution is based on the systematic use of selfreplicating code that constantly rewrites itself.