Mesh Net Viewer: A Visualization System for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) consist of several Access Points (APs) of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) interconnected through wireless link. Though the WMN are superior to scalability and flexibility, the network structure becomes complex with increasing of APs. As the results, it is difficult for network manager to grasp an equipment failure and performance degradation occurred in WMN quickly and accurately. In this paper, we propose a visualization system for WMN to realize the management of WMN intuitively. In the proposed system, it is possible to visualize some information in WMN, such as node configuration, network topology, communication route to gateway (GW), and captured packets. In order to evaluate the proposed system, we constructed WMN and implemented the system. We showed the effectiveness of the proposed system by verifying the information collection time for the number of hops and the number of nodes.