Visualising Internet Traffic Data with ThreeDimensional Spherical Display

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Visualising Internet Traffic Data with
Three-Dimensional Spherical Display
Ben Yip1,2, Shea Goyette2, Chris Madden1

• 1The National ICT Australia
• 2The University of Sydney

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Internet Traffic

• Autonomous System - a set of IP ranges managed by
  common routing policies and protocols
• Macroscopic view of the Internet
• Data collected by skitter monitors
• Courtesy of CAIDA http//www.caida.org for the
  data

3
VIBall

• A low cost interactive spherical display system
• Ball radius is 365 mm, covered with white matte
  coat, supported by many rollers.
• The rotation is detected by two optical mice

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VIBall

• Two calibrated projectors overlapped on the
  users position, and hence minimized the shadow
• The amount of rotation is reflected on the image
  projected and hence make the surface appears to
  move.

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ViBall

• The projectors are calibrated by matching
  projector pixels to physical points
• Intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters are
  calculated, by taking a set of known 3D points on
  the surface.
• Calibration software courtesy of Mitsubishi
  Electric Research Laboratory (MERL)

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Visualisation

• ASes are represented by nodes on a graph
• Geo-information visualisation bounded the
  position of the nodes
• Relocating the nodes implies a distortion in the
  underlying Earth map, or results in a loss of
  geographical information
• 3D is commonly used
• Based on a Earth map (NASA) and with low
  saturation

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Visualisation

• We use semi-transparent colouring for the nodes
• Radius 3 log (InDegree OutDegree 1)
• Colour ?.Pink (1- ?)Blue,
• With nodes that are fixed, there are clutters
  problem of drawing edges Cox95
• Drawing edges using curves
• Only drawing edges above a certain threshold
• Using interactive techniques
• We use straight lines and semi-transparent green
  for edges

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Reasons for Semi-Transparent Colour

• Show all nodes and edges
• Significance adds up automatically
• Cluster adds up automatically
• NASA/JPL-Caltech for the true spherical world
  maps

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Result
Show Video
Better if we have video
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Insight and Discovery

• Asia has relatively little Internet activity,
  compared with USA and Europe. We are a bit
  surprised at this, as China has the third highest
  Internet usage in the world Cnews02.
• The in-degree and out-degree for most of the AS
  nodes are approximately equal.
• Most of the Internet activity of Australia is
  linked directly to the mainland of USA. We would
  have expected that most of the connections to be
  routed through Asia or Hawaii.
• Within Australia, Alice Springs has a lot more
  Internet activity than it should, considering its
  population.

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Conclusion

• Visualisations often work best when they can
  utilise the underlying nature of the data for
  display.
• Global Internet traffic data has an inherent
  spherical nature, and so is ideally suited for
  spherical display.

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Conclusion

• Mendelzon MEN96 presented four principles for
  visualising the World Wide Web
• Layout (Geo-information)
• Abstract (Semi-transparency)
• Interaction (Hands-on rotation of the globe)
• Focus (Zooming?)
• The growth of the Internet has been exponential
  for the last decade. It may have been feasible
  for the user to focus on an edge or a node in
  1996, we feel this may no longer be so relevant
  for visualizing the entire data as a whole.

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Questions?
Thank you