In traditional wireless networks, omnidirectional antennas are used for transmission and reception. While this
increases the likelihood of a successful link, it also increases the likelihood
that one transmission will interfere with another and reduce the utility of the
network. In order to increase the performance of the network, reconfigurable
antennas that are capable of beam steering are being utilized in directional
routing schemes. Compared with traditional routing schemes, directional routing
allows nodes to transmit energy only towards the direction
of the intended receiver. Therefore, with a more concentrated energy
distribution, directional antennas greatly enhance network
capacity and achieve a higher signal to noise ratio while reducing the
interference on other nodes. When visualizing these systems, traditional network
visualization tools do not take into account antenna configuration. To solve this issue, routing tables and antenna configuration
information for the network was gathered from the Netlink Protocol Library
Suite (libnl) in Linux, and is then fed into MATLAB for processing. MATLAB was
used to create a tool to both visualize the network connectivity graph while
including some notion
of the antenna configuration.
The tool shows the shortest paths for signal transmissions by calculating the
lowest cost routing over each antenna configuration.
