Visual Models of Time-Varying Topology of Space-Based Networks

Time-varying characteristic of topological structure of space-based networks poses a unique challenge for visualization, which requires the support from visual models. This problem, however, has not been studied sufficiently. In this paper, we firstly establish a brief description for time-varying space-based networks. Then, on this basis, we propose two visual models, i.e., time-slices stack model and events-driven model. The experiments show that these two visual models can both support the visualization of topological structure of space-based networks, from which we can understand the time-varying characteristic when we explore the images of visualization. Moreover, we found that time-slices stack model is more suitable for offline analysis and events-driven model is best used for online analysis.