Golam H, Buchanan W, Smith I, Munoz J and
Mannion M, Component-based Tools Platform for Network
Testing, 9th IEEE Conference in ECBS, April 2002.
Abstract:
Tools development for testing real time systems
rely heavily on frameworks that are capable of delivering
the advantages of precise control, the availability
of a range of functions and the availability of
standardised and reusable components. The advantages
with having such a framework, results in considerable
saving in time and effort when new test tools are
de-veloped or when existing tools are upgraded.
The aim of this thesis is to propose a software
framework (termed tools platform hence-forth in
this thesis) that provides increased reusability,
configurability and efficiency to tool developers
and Tool Users. The tools platform designed as a
generic system could be in-stantiated with the desired
degree of granularity at start-up, allowing Tool
Users to add functions in the course of the tests.
Common utilities provided by the platform that allow
the Tool User to link tool libraries at run time,
route and share data within components, schedule
tasks for communications among components and format
data in network layers, could be readily used while
developing new tools. The immediate goals for the
develop-ment of the platform were to address the
following:
· Design the tool platform architecture
· Implement and test the basic tools platform;
· Prove the concept of this model by using
the tools-platform to load a real-time data generation
tool into the software system and perform real-time
data generation; and
· Test and compare real-time performance
of the platform with a purpose-built tool.
The platform was made to operate and control a
generation tool to generate Ethernet data over a
100BASE-T line. The platform obtained as high as
98.43% utilisation of the line at full loading and
compared quite well to a purpose built Ethernet
generator, which obtained 98.48% under similar conditions.
