Assessing Combinatorial Design for Analyzing System Performance of a Computer Network

Volume 16 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , Pages 83 – 91

Authors

¹ Software Engineering Research Group, Software Engineering Department, Engineering College,Salahaddin University

Generally, combinatorial design concerns with the arrangement of finite set of elements into

patterns (subsets, words, arrays) according to specified rules. The usefulness of this design method is

that the number of input combination can be reduced dramatically but all of them are covered by

the combinatorial set. This paper presents the application of this design method in communication

networks. Communication engineers can use this novel method to generate test cases for producing

cost-effective set of experiments to recognize the factors that have the least and most impact on the

system's performance. A well-known scenario is used for the purpose of the experiment and five

factors with different values are chosen to qualify their effect on the network performance. The

experimental set is generated using combinatorial design method and then it is been used to analyze

the effect of each factor. The experiments showed the effectiveness of the method to be used for

analyzing the effect of factors on communication network.

Keywords: Communication networks; combinatorial design; software testing; performance evaluation;

network design; design of experiments

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