The topic of the course that this project was for was “Data Vizualization” that was in the Fall of 2010.

The goal of the project, that we worked on over the course of the semester, was to collect network packets, analyze them, and display the connections in an interactive spiral treemap.

The project’s paper is available here.

In this project, we collected unencrypted wireless traffic information that was in range of a laptop we setup. The laptop was configured in monitor mode running Fedora 12 with an Intel wireless card. The wireless packets were captured via tcpdump and filtered by a perl script which then gave the selected information to a java program.

The java program was a multi-threaded GUI program that accepted the input and updated the GUI in real-time. The GUI display was of a spiral treemap design with other GUI objects to selectively modify the look and feel. Clicking nodes allowed for different views of what each IP was sending and/or receiving.