Nviz - A General Purpse Visualization tool for Wireless Sensor Networks
This tool addresses the need for flexible visualization in WSN research and development, but it is incremental as it builds on existing visualization concepts with improved adaptability.
The authors tackled the problem of time-consuming data visualization development for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) by proposing NViz, a general-purpose tool that adapts to any WSN through user-defined XML files, resulting in a tool that speeds up development and includes a replay mechanism for debugging.
In a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), data manipulation and representation is a crucial part and can take a lot of time to be developed from scratch. Although various visualization tools have been created for certain projects so far, these tools can only be used in certain scenarios, due to their hard-coded packet formats and network's properties. To speed up the development process, a visualization tool which can adapt to any kind of WSN is essentially necessary. For this purpose, a general-purpose visualization tool - NViz, which can represent and visualize data for any kind of WSN, is proposed. NViz allows users to set their network's properties and packet formats through XML files. Based on properties defined, users can choose the meaning of them and let NViz represents the data respectively. Furthermore, a better Replay mechanism, which lets researchers and developers debug their WSN easily, is also integrated in this tool. NViz is designed based on a layered architecture which allows for clear and well-defined interrelationships and interfaces between each component.