Soft Computing - A step towards building Secure Cognitive WLAN

Wireless Networks rendering varied services has not only become the order of the day but the demand of a large pool of customers as well. Thus, security of wireless networks has become a very essential design criterion. This paper describes our research work focused towards creating secure cognitive wireless local area networks using soft computing approaches. The present dense Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) pose a huge threat to network integrity and are vulnerable to attacks. In this paper we propose a secure Cognitive Framework Architecture (CFA). The Cognitive Security Manager (CSM) is the heart of CFA. The CSM incorporates access control using Physical Architecture Description Layer (PADL) and analyzes the operational matrices of the terminals using multi layer neural networks, acting accordingly to identify authorized access and unauthorized usage patterns. KeywordsCognitive Networks , Back Propogation , Soft Computing, IEEE 802.11, WLAN Security,Cognitive Framework Architecture, Multilayered Feedforward Neural Network (MFNN), Physical Architecture Description Layer(PADL), Cognitive Security