Systems Engineering with SDL: Developing Performance-Critical Communication Systems (Wiley Series on Communications Technology) - Hardcover

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Andreas Mitschele-Thiel is a research engineer at Bell Labs, working in the Global Wireless Systems area. He is also the Associate Rapporteur at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) responsible for performance and time aspects of the SDL standard. His work at Bell Labs, and previously at ALCATEL, means that his writing is grounded in practical experience, and his past roles as lecturer at Ohio State University and the University of Erlangen help to make this a thorough and accessible tutorial guide to creating successful communications systems.

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"This uniquely practical guide to developing performance applicaitons doesn't just tell you how to analyse and predict performance, it demonstrates how to actually achieve performance in a product. It combines a development process view with a low level discussion on implementation details in a comprehensive and well-structured reference which every SDL developer should have on their shelf." Anders Ek, Chief Methodologist, Telelogic AB
Perfomrance problems make projects fail. Unfortunately, they are often detected late in the development cycle adding considerable cost to the project and increasing time-to-market. Systems Engineering with SDL is a practical guide to designing and implementing communication systems and distributed applications, which tackles performance issues at their origin. After introducing the reader to performance engineering concepts, the book focuses on SDL and MSC. SDL is the most widely used formal description technique in the communications arena and is increasingly used in conjunction with UML to support formal design and implementation. The book goes on to demonstrate how to deal with specific issues such as inappropriate performance requirements, unsuitable system architecture and insufficiently detailed design or implementation decisions.
Aimed at experienced communication system designers and architects, this book goes beyond the basics to provide a detailed understanding of how to create high-performance real-time applications.
* Illustrates how to bring perfomrance and efficiency issues right to the forefront of the design process and ensure they are carried through to implementation.
* Guides you through the development process with reference to both waterfall and non-waterfall models.
* Provides coding guidelines to ensure implementation is smooth and trouble-free.
* Shows how SDL can be used alongside complementary languages and notations.
* Addresses project management issues in the development process.
* Provides an update on SDL-2000 and the new features that will affect your design.
Andreas Mitschele-Thiel is a Research Engineer at Bell Labs, working in the Global Wireless Systems area. He is also the Associate Rapporteur at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) responsible for performance and time aspects of the SDL standard, so he is well positioned to write this up-to-date and comprehensive reference.

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"This uniquely practical guide to developing performance applicaitons doesn't just tell you how to analyse and predict performance, it demonstrates how to actually achieve performance in a product. It combines a development process view with a low level discussion on implementation details in a comprehensive and well-structured reference which every SDL developer should have on their shelf." Anders Ek, Chief Methodologist, Telelogic AB
Perfomrance problems make projects fail. Unfortunately, they are often detected late in the development cycle adding considerable cost to the project and increasing time-to-market. Systems Engineering with SDL is a practical guide to designing and implementing communication systems and distributed applications, which tackles performance issues at their origin. After introducing the reader to performance engineering concepts, the book focuses on SDL and MSC. SDL is the most widely used formal description technique in the communications arena and is increasingly used in conjunction with UML to support formal design and implementation. The book goes on to demonstrate how to deal with specific issues such as inappropriate performance requirements, unsuitable system architecture and insufficiently detailed design or implementation decisions.
Aimed at experienced communication system designers and architects, this book goes beyond the basics to provide a detailed understanding of how to create high-performance real-time applications.
* Illustrates how to bring perfomrance and efficiency issues right to the forefront of the design process and ensure they are carried through to implementation.
* Guides you through the development process with reference to both waterfall and non-waterfall models.
* Provides coding guidelines to ensure implementation is smooth and trouble-free.
* Shows how SDL can be used alongside complementary languages and notations.
* Addresses project management issues in the development process.
* Provides an update on SDL-2000 and the new features that will affect your design.
Andreas Mitschele-Thiel is a Research Engineer at Bell Labs, working in the Global Wireless Systems area. He is also the Associate Rapporteur at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) responsible for performance and time aspects of the SDL standard, so he is well positioned to write this up-to-date and comprehensive reference.

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Excerpt from Systems Engineering with SDL by Mitschele-Theil

From The Foreward

Performance engineering means to describe, to analyze and to optimize the dynamic, time- dependent behavior of systems. However, it is common for a system to be fully designed and functionally tested before an attempt is made to determine its performance characteristics. The redesign of software and hardware is costly and may cause late system delivery. There are many dramatic examples of this from both the communication and computer industries, most recently concerning Internet providers. Responsible managers state that performance is the major cause of project failure. Moreover, there are many situations in which the functional properties of a system are directly influenced by the temporal behavior and vice versa. For example, communication protocols usually need time-out mechanisms; whether they deadlock or not is dependent on the selected timing parameter. A second example: analysing the performance of multiprocessors and distributed systems, functional dependencies and communication between distributed sub- tasks have to be carefully considered; program execution, efficient resource utilization and speed up may crucially depend on them. Therefore, it is clear that performance engineering has to be integrated into the design process from the very beginning.

The provision of tool-supported methods that can be integrated into commonly accepted and widely used software engineering techniques has a key position in this domain. In the area of development of telecommunications systems, the specification and description techniques SDL and MSC have played a dominate role for years. Both languages are standardized by the ITU. Despite the availability of tools for the generation of code from SDL specifications which target a variety of platforms, systematic investigations of the optimization of the generated code have not yet been performed and published. The book presents an investigation of the SDL-92/96 version of the SDL language. It addresses an improvement of the run-time properties by taking into account the characteristics of the applications (communication protocols) and different process scheduling and management strategies. The author concentrates on the efficient implementation of behavioural concepts. For the treatment of issues arising from object-oriented concepts the author applies the traditional flattening approach of the language standard. It is expected that a direct solution would result in further improvements for the performance of SDL-based applications.

The special value of this book lies in the systematic presentation of different implementation strategies, their constraints and their impact on performance. From these results we can derive concrete rules for the design and implementation of application- and platform-specific SDL compilers. Most of the results can also be applied to the most recent language version, i.e. SDL-2000.

It is a very demanding task to describe both worlds, that is, formal specification techniques on one side and performance evaluation and optimization on the other, to survey their essential points and to summarise a state-of-the-art integrated design process. However, the author presents for the first time a systematic and didactically convincing treatise, which explores the question of how to embed methods of performance engineering in real software development technologies. We believe that this publication will become a standard reference for performance engineers, promoting critical discussions and further research activities in this area.

Prof. Dr Joachim Fischer Humboldt-Universitdt zu Berlin rlangen-Niirnberg Prof. Dr Ulrich Herzog, Friedrich-Alexander-Universitdt Erlangen-N|rnberg