Applying performance modelling to a telecommunication system

Abstract

As telecommunication software systems are growing in size and complexity, the eflort of tuning them for performance becomes more costly and time-consuming. Performance modelling ofleers an eficient means of estimating software design and implementation alternatives, and is much easier to apply than actually changing the real system. Although it is widelv recognized that performance engineering is very important to the telecommunications industry, modelling techniques are not easily accessible to software developers. The most important obstacle is the cognitive gap between the software and the performance domains. This paper presents the experience of the authors in modelling an existing telecommunication product and then in using its results for capacity planning and for feeding back recommendations to the sofmare development team. The paper also describes an approach to make performance engineering more accessible to .software developers.