Mapping and Visualizing the Internet

we are collecting and recording routing paths from a test host to each of over 90,000 registered networks on the Internet. We've collected this data systematically since August 1998. The resulting database contains interesting routing and reachability information, and is available to the public for research purposes. The daily scans cover approximately a tenth of the routes on the Internet, with a full scan run roughly once a month. We have also been collecting Lucent's intranet data, and, for a time, we collected paths to Yugoslavia during and after the war. To visualize these databases, we use a simulated spring-force algorithm to lay out the paths. This algorithm is well known, but has never been applied to such a large problem. The Internet database, with around 88,000 nodes and 100,000 edges, is much larger than those previously considered tractable by the data visualization community. The resulting Internet layouts are pleasant, though rather cluttered. On smaller networks, like Lucent's intranet, the layouts present the data in a useful way. For the Internet data, we have tried plotting a minimum distance spanning tree; by throwing away data, we can make the remaining data accessible. Once a layout is chosen, it can be colored in various ways to show network-relevant data, such as IP address, domain information, location, ISPs, etc.,.