Trace Visualization of Distributed and Centralized Applications

Abstract: The Radio Access Network (RAN) plays a vital role in enabling mobile network connectivity using radio waves. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of RAN applications is crucial, and trace analysis provides valuable insights into their operations. Modern RAN applications can be deployed on different platforms and this can lead to the generation of different trace formats, which complicates the analysis process. Trace analysis and visualization tools, such as Trace Compass, can be used to ease the process, but for each new trace format the user often needs to create new code and visualizations. This is needed also when different trace formats generated by the same application contain similar information. To overcome this limitation, this thesis introduces an innovative approach to generalize the interpretation of traces, enabling to reuse existing analysis and visualization independently of the trace format. Moreover, a Domain Specific Language (DSL) is introduced to simplify the trace analysis procedure. The proposed thesis contributes to a generic approach for analyzing different trace formats, thereby facilitating the analysis of RAN applications deployed across diverse platforms.