Acquisition and Visualization of Hosts Connected to the Network

Global Computing Environment is a unified environment enabling users to access all the Internet accesible devices easily through the network without complicated configuration and technical knowledge. To realize Global Computing, host discovery inside the network is inevitable. Because of more complicated IP networking components and infrastructures, single host discovery method cannot detect all the hosts in various networks. In this research, we propose generic acquisition and visualization system of hosts connected to the network. Developing the application for presenting host information to the user, application enables invisible hosts visible to users. We implemented host acquisition system to discover and present host information accurately in real time. Our approach is modularizing various ways of host discovery tactics to solve host discovery difficulties, considering various network components and network devices. With variety of network accessible device from consumer low end to LAN, MAN, WAN based core node products, host acquisition tactics varies depending on their network platform Implementation. Packet capturing module is developed primarily to gather available host information from the network source using network monitoring. Global Computing Visualizer (GC Visualizer) is also designed and implemented with packet capturing module. The result of evaluation indicates accurate host discovery in Gigabit Ethernet network environment. By designing flexible method of host discovery, this design and implementation equips with adaptation to various IP network.