Computer Network Analysis by Visualization

Abstract: The explosive growth of Internet has raised interest in traffic analysis. Understanding what traffic traverse the network is important foroperation, investments, research and design of new protocols.
However network traffic analysis has not evolved as rapidly as network usage. Many researchers still look at data in raw text formateven though the human brain is much better at pattern recognitionin images than text. The purpose with this thesis is to develop a toolthat builds a graph to visualize network traffic. Network analysis using this approach is not new, but there are no tools available wherevisualization is the focus.
The network graph is built by defining hosts as nodes and communication between hosts as edges. To enable analysis the user can selecta subset of the traffic to visualize. The tool is able to produce graphson large data sets, 3000 nodes and 30000 edges, on a home computer.We have tested the tool on generated data and on data provided bythe MonNet project.
The tool is ready for testing but further development is neededsince the graph library we used is resource intensive when visualizinglarge graphs.