Simulation of UICCELL II.

In this paper we discuss a new approach to Perfor mance Engineering called the Object-Oriented Per formance Engineering Approach (OOPEA). OOPEA is an innovative approach to performance modeling, simulation and design where an object-oriented per formance analysis model, a discrete-event simula tion model and an operational model are integrated into a modeling framework. We emphasize simula tion in this paper and present a case study on the UICCELL II (University of Illinois at Chicago CELLular II switching system), a software simula tor of a cellular phone system. The system can be divided into three main components: the Mobile Switching Center, Base Site, and Mobile Telephone Unit, which have client-server relationships and communicate with each other using IPC facilities, via message passing. The UICCELL II is implemented in a distributed environment on SUN SPARC 1 and 10 workstations using an Ethernet LAN. Sim ulation is used to examine the dynamic behavior of the system, and helps to capture the performance constraints, mainly the contention for resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]