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Carleton University - School of Computer Science Undergraduate Honours Project Summer 2010 Interactive Visualization of NetADHICT Data Structures Eric Lawless 
ABSTRACT Computer and network administrators are often confused or uncertain about the behaviour of their networks. Traditional analysis using IP ports, addresses, and protocols are insufficient to understand network traffic. As such, novel analysis tools are increasingly needed by network administrators. NetADHICT is a such a tool; its key innovation has been its ability to identify and present a hierarchical decomposition of network traffic based upon the learned structure of both packet headers and payloads. While NetADHICT's core algorithms execute in real-time, its Ajax web interface has so far been unable to achieve interactive speeds. This is a major barrier to the adoption of NetADHICT as a real-time traffic management tool, and presents a clear opportunity for improvement. Thus, this project details the creation of an interactive replacement for NetADHICT's web interface. Developed as a cross-platform desktop application using the C++ programming language and the Qt framework, this interface represents several substantial improvements over its predecessor. By making use of client-side caching to reduce network communication, and by providing hardware-accelerated rendering via OpenGL, this new interface achieves real-time interactivity. Additionally, the choice of a Zoomable User Interface (ZUI) aims to improve the software's usability, and optimized algorithms for the layout of NetADHICT's tree-based hierarchical data structures are presented. |
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