The scalability of networked software-intensive switching systems is a widely recognized problem. Generally the software is large-scale, has a hierarchical, multilevel architecture, and supports several heterogeneous applications involving one or many communication protocols running on a networked computer system. These large scale commercial software systems may have been developed with the scalability as one of the key attribute of the architecture at the design stage but became non-scalable over a period of time with the introduction of new applications and protocols, the modifications of existing protocols, the addition of new features in the operating system, and the evolution of underlying hardware platforms. Worst is the situation with the software systems that were developed without scalability as an initial design goal. The objective of this project is to formulate, develop, and prototype scalability algorithms for communication software for a given performance objective that can be used for designing large-scale distributed systems that preserve their software architecture. Our goal is to apply the developed scalability algorithms to the system software of Voice over IP (VoIP) application.
The proposed research will develop scalability methods and algorithms that: (1) Identify the least scalable components of the architecture using which fundamental solutions to the scalability problem could be developed; (2) Apply the developed algorithms to commercially available VoIP system software and then examine the root causes of the scalability mismatch of hardware and software resources including the protocols. The methods and software developed under the project will be made available to the public via public domain web portal as well as conference/journal publications.
