Performance Test Design Process and Its Implementation Patterns for Multi-services Systems

Over the past years, the scope of telecommunication services has increased dramatically making network infrastructure-related services a very competitive market. Additionally, the traditional telecoms are combined with Internet technologies for providing a larger range of services. The obvious outcome is the increase of the number of subscribers and services demand. Due to this complexity, the performance testing of continuously evolving telecommunication services has become a real challenge and requires efficient and more powerful testing solutions. This ability highly depends on the performance test design and on the efficient use of hardware resources for test execution. This paper proposes a performance testing methodology which copes with the characteristics mentioned above. The methodology consists of a set of methods and patterns, exemplified for the TTCN-3 language, to realize adequate performance tests for multi-service systems. The effectiveness of this methodology is demonstrated throughout a case study on IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) performance testing.