PROTOCOL PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT METHODOLOGY - EXPERIMENTATION WITH SIGNALING SYSTEM NO 7

Abstract: Performance is the driving force for the effective network utilization in the current telecommunication world. The thesis aims to define suitable performance measurement methodologies for communication over stack based Signalling System No 7 (SS7). This thesis also throws a quick glance on open source SS7 and Ericsson proprietary SS7 protocols, to devise performance measurement approach that can be adopted to develop sophisticated tools. We adopt a scientific experimental approach for numerical measurement of throughput and latency of the protocol stack. Our current work finishes experimentation with open source SS7 protocol (SCTP) in Fedora based two identical servers. SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) is an important transport layer protocol for communication of SS7 message over an IP network. Message communication using SCTP protocol over an IP/Ethernet network between these two identical servers has been measured and analyzed using the IPerf tool. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) being another important transport layer protocol of TCP/IP stack, the performance of TCP is compared with SCTP. The results prove that under normal circumstances TCP gains over SCTP and our analysis support that under multi homing support, SCTP should gain over TCP when throughput is measured