A Topology Visualisation Tool for Large-Scale Communications Networks

A visualisation tool is presented to facilitate the study on large-scale communications networks. This tool provides a simple and effective way to summarise the topology of a complex network at a coarse level. It is relevant to study the topology of information and communications networks, such as the Internet, the World Wide Web and Peer-To-Peer (P2P) overlay networks, because structure fundamentally affects functions. These networks contain thousands or even millions of connections and their topologies are usually characterised by statistics. Here the authors introduce a simple tool to visualise a network's connectivity.