Performance Testing at Early Design Phases

Testing non-functional properties based on functional specifications at early design phases is still a challenge in teleservice and protocol engineering. Modelling and evaluating performance aspects along with the traditional functional verification oriented formal description techniques has to be integrated into one unified design process to avoid extra effort in maintaining consistency between multiple design models. The paper introduces PerfSDL, a semantic extension to SDL for modelling nonfunctional properties, and a performance evaluation framework based on PerfSDL and simulation. To verify the feasibility of the approach, three design alternatives in a small TCP-like packet transfer protocol above transport services of different quality were tested and evaluated by means of simulation and statistical analysis.