Protocol testing implies the functional analysis of a given implementation under test as well as its temporal performance evaluation. If protocols are formally specified sophisticated techniques and tools exist for analyzing functional properties, e.g. finding deadlocks or livelocks. Methods, however, for the temporal performance evaluation of formally specified systems are still in their infancy and tools for performance monitoring have to be developed. In the telecommunications industry SDL and MSC specifications are common FDTs for developing reactive real-time systems. While SDL specifications describe the overall system architecture in detail, MSC scenarios are used to specify the load-dependent behavior of interacting system components. For SDLlMSC specified systems, we present a method which allows a systematic quantitative temporal analysis of such systems. The basic idea is to apply MSCs in order to concentrate on the main parts of interacting SDL processes such as signal exchanges and timeouts. Thus, we can restrict the monitoring overhead by focussing on the most important points of interest in the interaction of communicating processes, and evaluating their behaviors by means of monitored event traces. Our approach allows us to integrate software and performance engineering techniques into a comprehensive methodology. A prototype tool called MISS was developed to proof the suitability and practicability of the method.
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