Visualizing large telecommunication data sets

Global telecommunication services create an enormous volume of real time data. Long distance voice networks, for example, can complete more than 250 million calls a day; wide area data networks can support many hundreds of thousands of virtual circuits and millions of Internet protocol (IP) flows and Web server sessions. Unlike terabyte databases, which typically contain images or multimedia streams, telecommunication databases mainly contain numerous small records describing transactions and network status events. The data processing involved therefore differs markedly, both in the number of records and the data items interpreted. To efficiently configure and operate these networks, as well as manage performance and reliability for the user, these vast data sets must be understandable. Increasingly, visualization proves key to achieving this goal. AT&T Infolab is an interdisciplinary project created in 1996 to explore how software, data management and analysis, and visualization can combine to attack information problems involving large scale networks. The data Infolab collects daily reaches tens of gigabytes. The Infolab project Swift-3D uses interactive 3D maps with statistical widgets, topology diagrams, and pixel oriented displays to abstract network data and let users interact with it. We have implemented a full scale Swift-3D prototype, which generated the examples presented.