Performance message sequence chart: Sprache zur Leistungsvorhersage mittels der Generierung eines Prototypen im Kontext des Protokollentwurfs mit SDL und MSC

During the development of communication systems, the languages MSC and SDL are used for the standardisation, development and implementation of protocols. Both languages are an essential part of today’s popular development methodologies with the UML language. In MSC specifications, the system is described by examples while in SDL specifications it is described completely by means of communicating automata. Depending on the point of view, communication systems are either real-time systems or resources used by different users. In either case, the functional and temporal behaviour is important. Thus, the temporal behaviour of different design possibilities must be evaluated in a model-based manner in early phases of the development. This also applies to the system design phase, where the architecture of the system is defined. The aim of this thesis is to analyse the temporal behaviour of the system subject to different variants of the architecture. To this end, a new concept is proposed with a view to generating an executable machine code from specified example runs. This thesis uses two existing approaches for the transformation of MSC and SDL specifications: On the one hand, different research groups work on correct transformations of MSC specifications to SDL specifications. On the other hand, SDL specifications have a long tradition in automated code generation for the target system. Based on these approaches the generation of a performance prototype from specified example runs is the obvious choice. The main idea for the analysis of the temporal behaviour of the system by means of the generation of a prototype is to use these approaches and add performance-specific extensions with functions that are called up from the prototype during run-time. The description of the systems behaviour includes two aspects: the description of the application and the description of the environment. They define the load that is executed by the system. The description of temporal characteristics of the system is formulated through requirements to be met by the system. The prototype is executed on the target platform or an emulator. Thus, the prototyping approach has the advantage that a separate machine model, which is a model of the hardware and system software, is not needed. The run of the prototype generates an event trace which can be evaluated automatically by means of the formulated requirements. This thesis proposes a concrete language approach Performance Message Sequence Chart (PMSC). The approach integrates the load description and the requirements description within a single document. The algorithms required for the transformation and the analysis are described.