Flexible Offline-Visualization for Mobile Wireless Networks

For the evaluation of wireless network protocols, simulation has established itself as a good compromise between cost and complexity, on the one hand, and accuracy of results, on the other hand. In order to assess and debug the simulated protocols, visualization both in the form of textual console messages and graphical representations can be of great help. In this paper, we present a network visualizer which was written for the wireless network simulator ShoX. Aside from nodes, links, movements and data packets, our visualizer allows to graphically display arbitrary node and link states in an intuitive and flexible way. As opposed to other visualization tools, it provides the possibility to change the way in which such inner states are displayed without running the simulation again. This can significantly improve the designer's productivity especially in complex network scenarios. Further, our visualizer allows to display textual debug messages together with the graphical animation in a synchronized form, thus combining the strengths of textual and graphical informations.