Simulation of UICCELL II

In this paper we discuss a new approach to Performance Engineering called the Object-Oriented Performance Engineering Approach (OOPEA). OOPEA is an innovative approach to performance modeling, simulation and design where an object-oriented performance analysis model, a discrete-event simulation model and an operational model are integrated into a modeling framework. We emphasize simulation in this paper and present a case study on the UICCELL II (University of Illnois at Chicago CeELLular II switching system), a software simulator 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. Simulation is used to examine the dynamic behavior of the system, and helps to capture the performance constraints, mainly the contention for resources.