The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	Visualization techniques for routing protocols and router configurations
Author:	Pursnani, Vandana
View Online:	njit-etd2001-012 (viii, 42 pages ~ 3.1 MB pdf)
Department:	Department of Computer and Information Science
Degree:	Master of Science
Program:	Computer Science
Document Type:	Thesis
Advisory Committee:	Manikopoulos, Constantine N. (Committee chair) Jorgenson, Jay (Committee member) Ziavras, Sotirios (Committee member) Shih, Frank Y. (Committee member)
Date:	2001-01
Keywords:	Routers Computer Protocols Visualization
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	An autonomous system (AS) is a group of routers managed by a particular organization. Exterior gateway protocols (EGP) are used between AS's Internal Gateway Protocols (IGP) is used within an AS. The most common protocols used with TCP/IP are RIP, OSPF (Open Shortest Path First), IGRP / Enhanced IGRP. The thesis revolves around OSPF protocol OSPF uses flooding to exchange link-state updates between routers. Any change in routing information is flooded to all routers in the network. Areas are introduced to put a boundary on the explosion of link-state updates. Flooding and calculation of the Dijkstra algorithm on a router is limited to changes within an area. Routers that belong to multiple areas, called area border routers (ABR), have the duty of disseminating routing information or routing changes between areas. Once information about routers is gathered there is no way to clearly visualize and manipulate it visually. The thesis was aimed at visualizing this kind of Router configuration information Visually using powerful tools and to be able to manipulate the figure generated. It also aimed visualizing bottleneck paths in the router configurations. The Powerful features of Java 3D were utilized for Visualization. We utilized the GMatrix class in the Java 3D API to store the router information. This was mapped onto a 3D Cylinder. Also due to the platform independence, robustness, scalability Java was the choice for such a development since routers would be cross platform.