Radian: Visual Exploration of Traceroutes

Several projects deploy probes in the Internet. Probes are systems that continuously perform traceroutes and other networking measurements (e.g. ping) towards selected targets. Measurements can be stored and analyzed to gain knowledge on several aspects of the Internet, but making sense of such data requires suitable methods and tools for exploration and visualization. We present Radian, a tool that allows to visualize traceroute paths at different levels of detail and to animate their evolution during a selected time interval. We also describe extensive tests of the tool using traceroutes performed by RIPE Atlas Internet probes.