Scalable network traffic visualization using compressed graphs

The visualization of complex network traffic involving a large number of communication devices is a common yet challenging task. Traditional layout methods create the network graph with overwhelming visual clutter, which hinders the network understanding and traffic analysis tasks. The existing graph simplification algorithms (e.g. community-based clustering) can effectively reduce the visual complexity, but lead to less meaningful traffic representations. In this paper, we introduce a new method to the traffic monitoring and anomaly analysis of large networks, namely Structural Equivalence Grouping (SEG). Based on the intrinsic nature of the computer network traffic, SEG condenses the graph by more than 20 times while preserving the critical connectivity information. Computationally, SEG has a linear time complexity and supports undirected, directed and weighted traffic graphs up to a million nodes. We have built a Network Security and Anomaly Visualization (NSAV) tool based on SEG and conducted case studies in several real-world scenarios to show the effectiveness of our technique.