Impact of coupling of distributed denial of service attack with routing on throughput of packet switching network

Abstract

We study the effects of coupling of the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack with routing on a packet switching network (PSN) performance measured by throughput. We conduct our study using PSN model that it is an abstraction of the Network Layer of the 7-Layer ISO OSI Reference Model. Our study demonstrates that even a very "weak" DDoS attack on a network using static routing causes degradation of the network throughput. The values of the throughput almost immediately decrease with each onset of a DDoS attack and they decrease with the increase of the number of attackers. However, this is not the case when the network uses an adaptive routing instead. We consider two different types of adaptive routings and our study shows that the adaptive routings have ability to process efficiently extra packet traffic generated by DDoS attacks without compromising the network throughput when the total amount of the incoming packet traffic, i.e. the regular one and the one coming from an attack, is lower than the one corresponding to the critical source load value. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.