Visual traffic monitoring and evaluation

As computer networks and associated infrastructures become ever more important to the nation's commerce and communication, it is becoming exceedingly critical that these networks be managed effectively. Current techniques, which rely on manual or log based analysis, are too slow and ineffective to handle the explosive growth of network infrastructures. We have developed visualization techniques geared towards aiding the analysis of network based infrastructures such that network managers can quickly identify usage characteristics of the network and reallocate bandwidth or restructure portions of the network to better improve connectivity. In this fashion, bottlenecks can be quickly identified along with their cause so the issues can be remedied expeditiously. The techniques can also be used for long range infrastructure planning and network misuse detection.