Are High-Level Languages Suitable for Robust Telecoms Software?

In the telecommunications sector product development must minimise time to market while delivering high levels of dependability, availability, maintainability and scalability. High level languages are concise and hence potentially enable the fast production of maintainable software. This paper investigates the potential of one such language, Erlang, to deliver robust distributed telecoms software. The evaluation is based on a typical non-trivial distributed telecoms application, a Dispatch Call Controller (DCC) measured on a Beowulf cluster. Our investigations show that the Erlang implementation meets the DCC’s resource reclamation and soft real-time requirements, before focusing on the following reliability properties. - Availability, e.g. recovery from failures is fast and repeated failures don’t reduce post-recovery throughput. - Redundancy degree, e.g. how many simultaneous copies of the system state can be maintained without impairing performance? - Resilience, e.g. achieving ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SAFECOMP
• Authors: Jan Henry Nyström, Philip W. Trinder, David J. King
• Keywords: Non-trivial Distributed Telecoms, Robust Distributed Telecoms, SAFECOMP 2005, Telecoms Software