earticle

영어

When developing or analyzing communication network protocols, it is often necessary to study pathological scenarios that may cause protocol performance problems. In this regard, it is well known that detailed protocol simulations are indispensable complements to formal protocol analysis and a number of powerful simulation environments are now available to facilitate such simulations. However to identify key performance characteristics or pathological scenarios, detailed tracing of the actual or simulated protocol executions is required, leading to large quantities of mostly irrelevant data. To find the interesting event sequences, the nature of the events must either be known (so that an automated search can be made for such known events), or the data must be searched more exhaustively. Such searching of detailed simulation trace data for pathological scenarios is tedious and error-prone. EVGATOR is a protocol visualization tool developed at the University of Florida College of Engineering (Gator Engineering) in collaboration with Intellon Corporation, that allows scan trace data quickly and to easily identify pathological situations. EVGATOR is flexible and configurable to display key trace data as space time diagrams with color coding for local protocol states. The juxtaposition and sequence of states can easily reveal problems in a protocol. By incorporating variable time resolution, most of the trace can be examined quickly at a high level, and the interesting segments can then be scrutinized in greater detail. EVGATOR was developed while designing a new generation of high speed Powerline communication protocols as the successor to the HomePlug 1.0 14 Mbps standard, and proved to be of enormous utility in that process. EVGATOR is freely available from the University of Florida, where the tool is undergoing continuous development to make it adaptable for visualization general network protocols.