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Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis
Internet Atlas Gallery

NSFNET growth until 1995

Donna Cox and Robert Patterson
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA),
National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
URL: http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SCMS/DigLib/text/technology/Visualization-Study-NSFNET-Cox.html

Visualization ThumbnailEvaluation
Strengths:
(Strength1): Visualization stresses the hierarchy of connections between backbone systems. Backbone nodes are prominently displayed above the geographical map, with all their respective clients below.
(Strength2): High level connectivity is readily perceivable when separated from the clutter of backbone-client connections.
Issues:
(Issue1): Only aggregated clients are displayed, and specific paths from backbone nodes to their clients are not known, therefore distances shown between the backbone and client nodes may be misleading.
(Issue2): Many backbone nodes serve distant clients across the continental US. This logical connectivity blurs attempts to correlate traffic with the geographical organization of the backbone and client nodes. While high connectivity is depicted, the visualization tends to be extremely busy and at times difficult to interpret.
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  Last Modified: Tue Oct-13-2020 22:21:40 UTC
  Page URL: https://www.caida.org/projects/internetatlas/gallery/nsfnet/eval.xml