Finding Spatial Patterns in Network Data

Abstract

Data on modern networks are massive and are applied in the area of monitoring and analyzing activities at the network element, network-wide, and customer and service levels for a heavily increasing number of networks since network technology is used in almost every personal computer. This results in very large log-files containing important data about the network behavior such as http accesses, e-mail headers, routing information of backbones, firewall alarms, or messages. Finding interesting patterns in network data is an important task for network analysts and managers to recognize and respond to changing conditions quickly; within minutes when possible. This situation creates new challenges in coping with scale. Firstly, the analysis of the huge amounts (usually tera-bytes) of the ever-growing network data in detail and the extraction of interesting knowledge or general characteristics about the network behavior is a very difficult task. Secondly, in practice, network data with geographic attributes are involved, and it is often important to find network patterns involving geo-spatial locations. In this paper we address the problem of finding interesting spatial patterns in network data. Sharing ideas and techniques from the pattern visualization and geo-spatial visualization areas can help to solve this problem. We provide some examples for effective visualizations of network data in a important area of application: the analysis of e-mail traffic.