Upstream Visibility: A Multi-View Routing Visualization

Abstract

The Internet is constantly evolving and changing over time. Outages, attacks, upgrades, censorships, and policy changes modify the routing very frequently everywhere in the world. To give the possibility to the Internet Service Providers and to the network operators of monitoring such an evolving scenario, many organizations collect the routing changes and give free access to them. We propose, prototype, and evaluate a visual interface, called Upstream Visibility, to display such data. It is based on three views: (1) a global view that, based on stacked area charts, gives the high level trend of the visibility of an IP prefix; (2) a local view allows the user to check the effects over time of the visibility of an IP prefix on specific locations of the network; and (3) a traditional graph animation view. Also, we propose heuristics for producing such type of drawings, evaluating their effectiveness and performance against scenarios describing well-known Internet incidents.