Worth a Thousand Bits: Visual Encoding of Tactical Communication Network Data

Tactical communication networks are difficult to understand. Their performance is governed by complex interactions between many parameters and these interactions are not yet well understood. Researchers working in this area lack a consistent lexicon for experiment terminology and often disagree as to which characteristics of a tactical network are necessary to sufficiently describe network performance. MIT Lincoln Laboratory is pursuing a new research effort to investigate how better visualizations of network data -- leveraging new software built upon visual design principles -- can help improve the understanding of and research into these emerging networks. This research has informed the development of NetSight, a prototype visualization framework that allows researchers to display and interact with data pertaining to multiple layers of the protocol stack simultaneously, though a variety of "views." The intent of the prototype is to create a framework to "test" a variety of visualizations and evaluate their effectiveness in the analysis of complex multi-dimensional network datasets. If successful, these visualizations will improve researchers' ability to understand and predict the performance of tactical networks, potentially leading to improvements in the design of future network protocols and architectures.