Visualization of traffic flows in a simulated network environment to investigate abnormal network behavior in complex network infrastructures

The design and implementation of complex network infrastructures requires early and extensive planning. However, increased complexity may make it more difficult to anticipate potential risks associated with the implementation and later with the operation of the network in question. In order to minimize the risk and potential effort fault/error/failure/alarm analysis during network operation, there exist a variety of network simulation tools, which allow to evaluate the feasibility of complex network environments and can be used to examine the envisioned infrastructure before implementation. If one wants to go one step further and simulate networks as realistically as possible for an extensive analysis, the choice of available tools is rather small. An interaction of emulated routers - i.e. with their virtualized operating systems and configuration interfaces - and a simulation environment can remedy this. The fact is that there is only limited existence of such software solutions on the market. Indeed, these products usually lack an essential function - the visual representation of the traffic flows for investigating network behavior under various test or failure scenarios. This article aims to show ways to solve this problem and to investigate its applicability to other scenarios based on the utilization of various standards.