Issues in Interoperability and Performance Verification in a Multi-ORB Telecommunications Environment

The rapid change of the telecommunications environment demands that new services are developed and deployed quickly and legacy systems are integrated seamlessly. While emerging technologies and standards such as CORBA will allow rapid solution integration via shared reusable components, new issues arise for interoperability and performance assurance in a highly heterogeneous environment. In this paper, we first identify these issues in a multi-vendor and multi-ORB telecommunications environment. We then propose a systematic approach for interoperability verification using a reference ORB and industry standard test suites. We extend our interoperability-testing framework to performance verification, where the scope of the tests is detailed and the design strategy is analyzed.