Simulated testing in mobile datacom systems (GPRS/UMTS) : postgraduate thesis information and communication technology

Abstract

The assignment described in this thesis is given by Ericsson AS and gives an evaluation of simulation and testing tools used in their development projects. Since Ericsson wants to change their testing process the task was to evaluate and suggest a solution to how this could be done. In order to make testing available for all developers it was required to run tests independent of hardware. Thus they wanted to simulate the hardware resources. Originally, the intention was to use the test environment used otherwise in Ericsson. This proved to cause many problems because the project became dependent of other developers work, and the instability of the test environment caused delays. In order to avoid these problems the assignment had to be redefined. This was done in collaboration with the supervisor; and it was decided to develop a new testing environment. Several tools had to be used in order to develop an appropriate testing environment. This meant acquiring knowledge about the tools used otherwise for software development at Ericsson. This included among others, protocol development tool, STREAMS, client – server programming using C-language, and programming real-time applications in the Tornado environment (VxWorks and VxSim). The purpose for the assignment was to compare a real-time operating system, VxWorks, and a software package, VxSim, which simulates VxWorks on a UNIX Workstation. The test results show that VxSim is the fastest alternative of the two. The tests also reveal that VxSim is unstable and unreliable. On the other hand VxWorks is very reliable and stable. The test results vary depending on the processor type used for testing. VxSim is well suited for testing in the early stages of the project, thus it does not support all the features available in VxWorks. VxWorks and VxSim may very well be used jointly in the development and testing processes.