System-Level Performance Analysis of Embedded Systems for GSM Applications

An embedded system is an integration of customized hardware and optimized software designed for a specific function running continuously. In recent years, with the advent of increasing embedded telecom, an application running on dedicated platforms and the evaluation of system-level performance are essential. This paper proposes the procedure to analyze the low-level performance of three embedded platforms. These values are useful for GSM protocol stack developers for MS (Mobile Station), BTS (Base Transceiver Station), BSC (Base Station Controller) and MSC (Mobile Switching Center) to investigate system level issues at early stages. Lmbench is a powerful micro-benchmarks used to evaluate the latency and bandwidth measurements for embedded systems. These are very much useful for telecommunication signaling applications used with different protocol stacks. Lmbench is also used to characterize the early system-level performance of the processor board and real-time operating system (RTOS). At present, embedded Linux has become a heart of research in embedded system domain, so this paper focused on RTLinux as an RTOS. An experiment with the three processor boards, MPC 8548E, ARM920T, and ARM1176JZF-S, is set up to analyze the system-level performance of these processor boards. By comparing the system-level performance analysis of these platforms at the early stages, a telecom application developer can decide which board/processor is suitable for their application. Thus, we can reduce the time and cost by investigating the performance of processor boards and increasing the quality of embedded system testing for different telecom applications. This paper elaborates and discusses the system-level performance with the results for three processor boards.