Component-based network test tools platform for network design and maintenance

Tools development for testing real time systems rely heavily on frameworks that are capable of delivering the advantages of precise control, the availability of a range of functions and the availability of standardised and reusable components. The advantages with having such a framework, results in considerable saving in time and effort when new test tools are de-veloped or when existing tools are upgraded.The aim of this thesis is to propose a software framework (termed tools platform hence-forth in this thesis) that provides increased reusability, configurability and efficiency to tool developers and Tool Users. The tools platform designed as a generic system could be in-stantiated with the desired degree of granularity at start-up, allowing Tool Users to add functions in the course of the tests. Common utilities provided by the platform that allow the Tool User to link tool libraries at run time, route and share data within components, schedule tasks for communications among components and format data in network layers, could be readily used while developing new tools. The immediate goals for the develop-ment of the platform were to address the following:• Design the tool platform architecture• Implement and test the basic tools platform;• Prove the concept of this model by using the tools-platform to load a real-time data generation tool into the software system and perform real-time data generation; and• Test and compare real-time performance of the platform with a purpose-built tool.The platform was made to operate and control a generation tool to generate Ethernet data over a 100BASE-T line. The platform obtained as high as 98.43% utilisation of the line at full loading and compared quite well to a purpose built Ethernet generator, which obtained 98.48% under similar conditions.Keywords: network, maintenance, components, reus