Identifying Relevant Cross-Layer Interactions in Cognitive Processes

Cognitive networks were recently proposed to cope with the complexity and the dynamics of network managements, exploiting reasoning to adapt the behavior of protocols. Among the reasoning formalisms that can be employed, Fuzzy Cognitive Maps seem to be very promising, as they potentially allow the cognitive process to consider cross-layer interactions in the characterization of the performance of a network node. However, when considering a high number of cross-layer interactions, reasoning schemes can be too time consuming and may not provide a suitable solution as environmental conditions change. In order to decrease the demand of reasoning time it is of utmost importance to discover which cross-layer relationships carry relevant information to the cognitive process. This paper discusses how to make such differentiation. Moreover, it proposes a metric to evaluate the influence a cross-layer interaction has on the cognitive process.