Performance Testing of the 5G System Component Testing Tool Endeavour

Abstract

With the emergence of 5G as the primary cellular network, system component testing (SCT) has become vital for the development of 5G. While the standard recommends the conformance testing language TTCN-3 to test system components, it comes with its drawbacks. Thus, Nokia – the commissioner of this thesis - started its own endeavour to test 5G components. Consequently, the purpose of this thesis was to compare the performance of TTCN-3 and Nokia’s own approach, Endeavour. Both approaches were compared by sampling the CPU and RAM performance. The findings of 100 test cases were represented in a graph and a boxplot while showing statistics.

The research focuses on CPU performance since the RAM performance shows no significant impact, which is backed up by theoretical research. Since Endeavour does not utilize the whole range of computer cores given, a theoretical research based on Amdahl’s Law explores the hypothetical performance gain if all cores would be utilized. The research uses the CPU performance and execution time of TTCN-3 testing as a guideline, while the theory of Amdahl’s Law is applied. The result of the hypothetical research was that Endeavour testing can outperform the TTCN-3 based testing if the advice is to be followed.