Sonification Aesthetics and Listening for Network Situational Awareness

This paper looks at the problem of using sonification to enable network administrators to maintaining situational awareness about their network environment. Network environments generate a lot of data and the need for continuous monitoring means that sonification systems must be designed in such a way as to maximise acceptance while minimising annoyance and listener fatigue. It will be argued that solutions based on the concept of the soundscape offer an ecological advantage over other sonification designs.Comment: Workshop paper presented at SoniHED --- Conference on Sonification of Health and Environmental Data, York, UK, 12 September, 201

Sonification of a Network's Self-Organized Criticality for Real-time Situational Awareness

Communication networks involve the transmission and reception of large volumes of data. Research indicates that network traffic volumes will continue to increase. These traffic volumes will be unprecedented and the behaviour of global information infrastructures when dealing with these data volumes is unknown. It has been shown that complex systems (including computer networks) exhibit self organized criticality under certain conditions. Given the possibility in such systems of a sudden and spontaneous system reset the development of techniques to inform system administrators of this behavior could be beneficial. This article focuses on the combination of two dissimilar research concepts, namely sonification (a form of auditory display) and self organized criticality (SOC). A system is described that sonifies in real time an information infrastructure's self organized criticality to alert the network administrators of both normal and abnormal network traffic and operation. It is shown how the system makes changes in a system's SOC readily perceptible. Implications for how such a system may support real-time situational awareness and post-hoc incident analysis are discussed