SNAMP: A Multi-sniffer and Multi-view Visualization Platform for Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the resource-constrained features and the inherent lack of user-network interfaces, current wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are suffering too limited visibility into the applications. As a result, it is often very difficult to find issues that arise during their development and deployment. Visualization is an attractive and popular way to understand behaviours of complex systems. Visualization platform is therefore a key issue to develop WSNs applications. In this paper, our self-developed sensor network analysis and management platform (SNAMP), a novel multi-sniffer and multi-view visualization platform for WSNs is proposed and implemented. In SNAMP, data emitted by individual sensor nodes is collected by a multi-sniffer data collation network and passed to a flexible multi-view visualization mechanism. SNAMP indicates network topology, sensing data, network performance, hardware resource depletion, and other abnormalities in WSNs and allows developers adding application specific visualization functions, which will facilitate the research and development of various sensor networks and shorter the time from laboratory to applications