The Computer Journal Advance Access published online on June 5, 2009
The Computer Journal, doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxp053
The Cognitive Packet Network: A Survey
Intelligent Systems and Networks Group, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London SW7 2BT UK
* Corresponding author: g.sakellari{at}imperial.ac.uk
Received 10 October 2008; revised 7 May 2009
Current and future multimedia networks require connections under specific quality of service (QoS) constraints which can no longer be provided by the best-effort Internet. Therefore, smarter networks have been proposed in order to cover this need. The cognitive packet network (CPN) is a routing protocol that provides 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. The CPN was first introduced in 1999 and has been used in several applications since then. Here we provide a comprehensive survey of its variations, applications and experimental performance evaluations.
Key Words: cognitive packet networks random neural network quality of service routing protocol self-aware networks