Internet Atlas Gallery

GTrace - Geographical Traceroute

Ram Periakarrupen
Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA)
San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)
University of California, San Diego (UCSD)

URL: https://www.caida.org/catalog/software/gtrace/

Visualization Thumbnail

About the Visualization

Visualization Techniques:
(Technique1): Plot lat/long points; draw straight lines between hops.

Key Visualization Mappings:
(Mapping1): Line color shows confidence in location mapping.

Green line = high confidence in both endpoints
Yellow line = high confidence in one endpoint; moderate confidence in other
Blue line = moderate confidence in both endpoints
Red line = geographic center of the country where the IP address is believed to be located, or the location obtained from the whois record of the associated domain name

(Mapping2): Colored ball indicates the data source used for the lat/long mapping

Green = DNS LOC record
Yellow = Match found in GTrace DBs or user DBs
Blue = Domain parsing file
Cyan = Hostname reduction match
Red = WHOIS record of the best-match domain name for IP address
Gray = Country code

(Mapping3): Color of RTT value shows how many packets were lost:

Black = none
Blue = lost one pkt
Red = lost 2 or 3 pkts

Visualization Tools:
(Tool1) traceroute by Van Jacobsen
(Tool2) GTrace java code by Ram Periakaruppen (CAIDA).
(Tool3) NetGeo utilities by CAIDA

Click Image for Full-Size Visualization

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