MANET-Viewer II: A Visualization System for Visualizing Packet Flow in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are autonomous distributed networks, where mobile nodes communicate with each other using wireless links. Since the communication is done by wireless links, it is difficult to grasp how the packets flow between communication nodes. It becomes even more difficult when the number of nodes is increased. In our previous work, we proposed a visualization system for MANET network topology. However, in the previous version, we could not implement the visualization of packet flow. In this paper, we improve our previous system by implementing the visualization of packet flow. We call this system MANET-Viewer II. In order to show the effectiveness of MANET-Viewer II, we implemented DSR routing protocol and visualized its packet flow. Furthermore, we verified the effectiveness of visualization method by experiments.