Network Situational Awareness

The ever increasing size and dynamics of networks like the GIG-NCES communications network, makes situational awareness, intrusion detection and network monitoring very difficult. Dynamic and evolving networks provide unique challenges because the location, number and addresses of the nodes in the network are constantly changing. A single tool is needed to provide administrators and users with a situational picture of the network. This tool will need to provide various real-time and offline views of the network to allow administrators to quickly and more efficiently see problems and attacks to quickly respond to prevent and minimize consequences. To address these challenges Architecture Technology Corporation (ATC) will design the NetVSA (Network Visual Situational Awareness) toolkit as an innovative, dynamic visualization toolkit. The key innovations and benefits of NetVSA are: 1) Allows users to manipulate the visualization of the data; 2) Designed for evolving and dynamic networks; 3) Provides an extendable distributed hierarchical monitoring and collection system.