An Efficient Performance Testing Methodology for Telecommunication Subsystems

Abstract: Large telecommunication software subsystems like message routers and gateways are characterized by requirements of very high reliability, availability, large throughput, low latency and significant intermediate storage. While Moor’s law in the hardware platform has helped, software sub-systems still remain the critical bottlenecks. This further compounded by the continuous addition of newer features to legacy systems. This leads to the need for exhaustive performance testing, profiling and tuning of these mission critical components during the product lifecycle.
While there are multiple approaches to performance testing, we have found a combination of benchmark testing, peak-rest test and stress test to be significantly effective to pin-point issues with respect to performance, reliability and scalability.
This paper presents this methodology in the context of SMSC (Short Message Service Center), which is a typical telecommunication subsystem

Profile: Sudipta Debnath has been with Aricent Technologies since 2004, where she currently leads the QA team of Comverse-IDC. Prior to Aricent, she worked at Motorola India in the CDMA Load tool division (between 2001-2004).

Her major expertise is in the domain of performance tuning, optimization and testing of telecommunication subsystems. She can be reached at: sudipta.debnath@aricent.com