The automated functional and performance analysis of communication systems specified with some Formal Description Technique has long been the goal of telecommunication engineers. In the past SDL and Petri nets have been the most popular FDTs for the purpose. With the growth in popularity of UML the most obvious question to ask is whether one can translate one or more UML diagrams describing a system to a performance model. Until the advent of UML 2.0, that has been an impossible task since the semantics were not clear. Even though the UML semantics are still not clear for the purpose, with UML 2.0 now released and using ITU recommendation Z.109, we describe in this dissertation a methodology and tool called proSPEX (protocol Software Performance Engineering using XMI), for the design and performance analysis of communication protocols specified with UML.
Our first consideration in the development of our methodology was to identify the roles of UML 2.0 diagrams in the performance modelling process. In addition, questions regarding the specification of non-functional duration contraints, or temporal aspects, were considered. We developed a semantic time model with which a lack of means of specifying communication delay and processing times in the language are addressed. Environmental characteristics such as channel bandwidth and buffer space can be specified and realistic assumptions are made regarding time and signal transfer.
With proSPEX we aimed to integrate a commercial UML 2.0 model editing tool and a discrete-event simulation library. Such an approach has been advocated as being necessary in order to develop a closer integration of performance engineering with formal design and implementation methodologies. In order to realize the integration we firstly identified a suitable simulation library and then extended the library with features required to represent high-level SDL abstractions, such as extended finite state machines (EFSM) and signal addressing. In implementing proSPEX we filtered the XML output of our editor and used text templates for code generation. The filtering of the XML output and the need to extend our simulation library with EFSM abstractions was found to be significant implementation challenges.
Lastly, in order to to illustrate the utility of proSPEX we conducted a performance analysis case-study in which the efficient short remote operations (ESRO) protocol is used in a wireless e-commerce scenario.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uctcs/oai:techreports.cs.uct.ac.za:199 |
| Date | 01 January 2005 |
| Creators | de Wet, Nico |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | pdf http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/archive/00000199/01/ndewet_thesis.pdf |
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