Graph-based structural analysis for telecommunication systems

Abstract

Many methods and tools for the reengineering of software systems have been developed so far. However, the domain-specific requirements of telecommunication systems have not been addressed sufficiently. The E-CARES project is dedicated to reverse engineering of complex legacy telecommunication systems by providing graph-based tools. With E-CARES, the software architecture of a telecommunication system is recovered in two steps. In the first step (program analysis), the source code is parsed to build a structure graph which uses the abstractions of the underlying programming language and describes the internals of program units (blocks) as well as their communication via exchange of signals. In the second step, a software architecture description is abstracted from the structure graph. The software architecture is described in ROOM, a real-time object-oriented modeling language for embedded systems design. Both program analysis and architecture recovery are based on graphs and graph transformations. In both steps, domain-specific knowledge-referred to as methods of use-is exploited which refers to the ways how language constructs are used to realize processing concepts of telecommunication systems. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.