Networks
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.
