Radial Hierarchical Visualization

Authors

Keim, Daniel

Mansmann, Florian

Short Description

The Radial Traffic Analyzer display is perfectly suitable to show grouped information in the inner circles while presenting related detail information on the outer circles. It is complemented by appropriate interaction techniques like hints on mouse-over, drag & drop to adapt the order of the rings, filtering using clicks and details accessible via a popup menu.

Keim, Daniel et al., 2006

Figures

The Radial Traffic Analyzer visualizes network traffic in a radial hierarchical layout. In the default configuration the Radial Traffic Analyzer uses four concentrical rings, each representing one attribute of the transferred packets.

The innermost ring shows the IP adresses of the packet source, the second ring shows the destination IP, the third ring shows the source port number and the outermost ring the destination port number. The size of the area of each entry specifies the fraction of the traffic payloads. To improve the readability, entries with the same values (same IP or same port number) are drawn in the same colour, entries of prominent ports in unique colours (e.g. port 80 - HTTP or port 110 - POP3) and traffic over secured channels is shown in brighter colours.

Each ring uses the rings further inside for grouping and sorting, as shown in the next figure:

The Radial Traffic Analyzer allows a lot of user interactions. The order of the rings can be changed adapted to the users needs, as well as the number of the rings or their attribute types. For example, the Radial Traffic Analyzer can be configured to show up security alerts generated by an intrusion detection system:

Evaluation

Komlodi, Anita H.