  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
neither 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 internal information like transmission properties and node
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.
