A performance test design method and its implementation patterns for multi-services systems

Over the last few years, the scope of telecommunication services has increased dramatically making network infrastructure-related services a very competitive market. Additionally, the traditional telecoms are now using Internet technology to provide a larger range of services. The obvious outcome is the increase in the number of subscribers and services demanded. Due to this complexity, the performance testing of continuously evolving telecommunication services has become a real challenge. More ecient and more powerful testing solutions are needed. This ability depends highly on the workload design and on the effcient use of hardware resources for test execution. The performance testing of telecommunication services raises an interesting problem: how to create adequate workloads to test the performance of such systems. Traditional workload characterization methods, based on requests/second, are not appropriate since they do not use proper models for traffic composition. In these environments, users interact with the network through consecutive requests, called transactions. Several transactions create a dialog. A user may demand in parallel two or more services and different behavioural patterns can be observed for different groups of users. This thesis proposes a performance testing methodology which copes with the afore mentioned characteristics. The methodology consists of a set of methods and patterns to realize adequate workloads for multi-service systems. The effectiveness of this methodology is demonstrated throughout a case study on IP Multimedia Subsystem performance testing.