Improving situation awareness in cognitive networks using the Self-Organizing Map

Situation awareness is provided through a cognitive process. To make reasonable decisions a cognitive system, which could be a human or machine, should be aware of available resources and capacity, current configuration and even some information about previous states. The paper provides a study of situation awareness mechanisms in cognitive Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET), and applies Kohonen network also known as the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) to analyze and visualize the current network situation for decision-making. Focus is on situation awareness of network security which naturally requires some basic metrics for security which are also defined. The Self-Organizing Map shows an efficient tool to analyze and visualize complex, multi-dimensional situational data. A clustered result map of the SOM could be used for decision-making. The paper also defines how to use the SOM for network security status monitoring.