Abstract:

A message sequence chart (MSC) is a high-level description of the message interaction between system components and their environment. Communication between distributed instances can be described by MSCs and these descriptions can be extended by notions for time consumption and resources and afterwards included in a system performance model. Such models can be evaluated by discrete event simulation or under reasonable assumptions alternatively with analytical queueing network algorithms. In this way steady state performance measures like resource utilizations and end-to-end delays can be calculated with low effort. The simulation uses the same input like the analytical formulas and allows for the investigation of dynamic performance behaviour or for the study of models including features which can not be handled by analytical formulas.