Early performance prediction of SDL/MSC specified systems by automated synthetic code generation

We present a new approach for early performance prediction based on MSC speci ed systems in the context of SDL Our approach is integrated into existing design methodologies as proposed by commercial tool vendors where communication software is fully speci ed in SDL and the nal implementation is derived from there Obviously the structure of the SDL speci cation will in uence the performance of the nal system Thus it is very important to make performance estimates for the target system available at design time to steer important design decisions The key to performance evaluation is the development of performance models which are evaluated either with analytical simulation or monitoring techniques Our approach is scenario based and uses non functional annotations of MSCs to formalize additional performance requirements These MSCs are automatically transformed to an SDL speci cation which yields a prototype implemention via a code generation tool chain The resulting implementation is executed on the target machines with the target system software from which many performance character istics can be evaluated using monitoring techniques We call the implementation synthetic since it is arti cially derived from MSC speci cations and the generated SDL is not designed to be subsequently reused through functional re nement This paper describes the automatic transformation from MSC to the SDL speci cation and its environment with a special focus on dynamic issues