Automated Performance Prototyping for SDL/MSC-specified Systems

摘要

Methodologies developed with the standardized languages SDL (Specification and Description Language, ITU recommendation 2.100) and MSC (Message Sequence Chart, ITU recommendation Z. 120) are very popular in the field of telecommunications, as they integrate all essential steps in the protocol life cycle. One step among others is the automated generation of executablesfrom the SDL specification. Telecommunication systems are always real time systems, therefore functional and performance aspects must be closely integrated into the development process. We present a new approach integrated into these methodologies for early performance prediction based on scenarios. These scenarios are given in MSC where the message exchange between processes is specified by example. These scenarios are automatically transformed to an SDL specification which yields a prototype implementation via a code generation tool chain. The resulting implementation is executed on the target machines with the SDL runtime environment. By monitoring this system various performance characteristics can be gained like processor load, channel utilization, reponse time. This allows early performance prediction for the given scenarios in a system environment which integrates target HW and system SW in a realistic way. In this paper we will present our tool chain to derive performance prototypes directly from scenarios specified in MSC. Moreover we give examples how our technique supports the protocol engineer beyond alternative approaches.