EXtensible animator for mobile simulations: EXAMS

One of the most widely used simulation environments for mobile wireless networks is the network simulator 2 (NS-2). However NS-2 stores its outcome in a text file, so there is a need for a visualization tool to animate the simulation of the wireless network. The purpose of this tool is to help the researcher examine in detail how the wireless protocol works both on a network and a node basis. It is clear that much of this information is protocol dependent and cannot be depicted properly by a general purpose animation process. Existing animation tools do not provide this level of information nor permit the specific protocol to control the animation at all. EXAMS is an NS-2 visualization tool for mobile simulations which makes possible the portrayal of NS-2's internal information like transmission properties and node's data structures. This is mainly possible due to EXAMS extensible architecture which separates the animation process into a general and a protocol specific part. The latter can be developed independently by the protocol designer and loaded on demand. These and other useful characteristics of the EXAMS tool can be an invaluable help for a researcher in order to investigate and debug a mobile networking protocol.