Research On Telecommunication Software Variability Management Mechanism

Software variability is the ability of a software system or artefact to be efficiently extended, changed, customized or configured for use in a particular context. Software variability attracts a lot of interests in recent year and is deemed to be key issues which influence the reuse efficiency for software product families. Effective variability management requires comprehensive changes to the software development process. Variability must be considered at each development phase, which includes the requirements collection to the final implementation, and even the latter maintenance and evolution phase.The traditional telecommunication network is evolving to the next generation network which is fully open and competitive. The requirements on function and perforamnce from customer and telecom operators for telecommunication software are more and more, but the time leaving for development are less and less, thus telecommunications software provider is facing ever growing pressure. Based on the domain characteristics of telecommunication software, with systematic analysis and management of telecommunications software variability, preferable systematic solution can be provided for telecommunication software products families, which can effectively improve the production efficiency of telecommunications software and have very important theoretical and practical significance. Within this background, this dissertation makes an in-depth and systematic research on the management mechanism of telecommunication software.The main innovation of this thesis is summarized as follows:1．Based on the analysis of characteristics of telecommunications software, this dissertation proposes a method which supports separation of concerns on telecommunications software functional attributes from "behavioral characteristics", "Service Properties" and "Coordination logic". This can greatly reduce the complexity of variability management and improve the development efficiency of telecommunications software.2．Based on the requirement analysis of telecommunications software variability model, this dissertation proposes a framework to model telecommunications software variability. TeleSVM MetaModel and TeleSVM UML Profile with the extention of UML language are presented here. This extention provides a uniform formalization description for the variability analyzing. 3．Based on the study of domain model and domain analysis method, this dissertation proposes a domain model called TeleSCM, which can provide the method for domain analysis and design of telecommunication software.4．Based on the research of software framework and analysis on telecommunication software, component oriented software framework for telecommunication software (COSFoTS) is put forwared in this dissertation. It can provide implementation solution for telecommunication software variability management.5．This dissertationthe introduce orthogonal decomposition of functional components and extension mechanism based on registration and integration, which can make components are fully scalable and the modification of component don't impact greatly.6．ALDL(application logic description language)based application logic generation are proposed in this dissertation, which effectively improve the development flexibility and efficiency of telecommunication software.The variability management mechanism had been put into practice in the development of IMS CSCF and was proved to be effective.