MoVA: A Visual Analytics Tool Providing Insight in the Big Mobile Network Data

Abstract

AbstractMobile networks have numerous exploitable vulnerabilities that enable malicious individuals to launch Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and affect network security and performance. The efficient detection and attribution of these anomalies are of major importance to the mobile network operators, especially since there is a vast amount of information collected, which renders the problem as a Big Data problem. Previous approaches focus on either anomaly detection methods, or visualization methods separately. In addition, they utilize solely either the signaling or the Call Detail Record (CDR) activity in the network. This paper presents MoVA (Mobile network Visual Analytics), a visual analytics tool for the detection and attribution of anomalies in mobile cellular networks which combines anomaly detection and visualization, and is applied on both signaling and CDR activity in the network. In order to address the large volume of the data, the proposed application starts with an aggregated overview of the whole network and allows the operator to gradually focus on smaller sets of data, using different levels of abstraction. The proposed visualization methods are able to differentiate between different user behaviors, and enable the analyst to have an insight in the mobile network operation and easily spot the anomalous mobile devices. Hypothesis formulation and validation methods are also provided, in order to enable the analyst to formulate network security-related hypotheses, and validate or reject them based on the results of the analysis.KeywordsMobile network securitybig datavisual analyticsinformation visualizationanomaly detectionhypothesis formulation and testing