Distributed Load Tests with TTCN-3

The design of TTCN-3 focused on extensions to address testing needs of modern telecom and datacom technologies and widen the applicability to many kinds of tests including performance tests. One of the most important features of TTCN-3 is the platform independence which allows testers to concentrate on the test specification while the complexity of the underlying platform (i.e., operating system, hardware configuration, etc.) is left behind the scene. As far as the test distribution is concerned, TTCN-3 provides the necessary language elements for distributed tests. This is however supported in a transparent fashion so that the same test may run either locally or distributed. The distributed execution of a test enables the execution of test components belonging to one test configuration on different computers (the test nodes), sharing thus a bigger amount of computational resources. Test distribution is a research challenge when it comes to the problem of how to distribute the test components efficiently on the test nodes. Specifically for load testing – a particular kind of performance test – we investigate strategies to distribute tests on heterogeneous hardware in order to use the hardware resources of the test nodes efficiently.