Functional Reactive Programming as programming model for telecom server software

• Main Author: Toczé, Klervie
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Linköpings universitet, Programvara och system 2014
• Subjects: reactive-banana; functional reactive programming; maintainability; performance; object-oriented programming; LTE; telecom application; Computer Sciences; Datavetenskap (datalogi)
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-113142

This thesis studies the use of the functional reactive programming (FRP) framework reactive-banana in a prototype which simulates a part of a Long-Term Evolution (LTE) base station: the Radio Resource Control connection setup procedure. The investigated problem is to determine whether using this FRP framework leads to an implementation with suitable performance and improved maintainability compared to the current implementation. Enhancing the maintainability of the base station software enables quicker and more efficient maintenance activities, which lead to an improved customer satisfaction. Moreover, it means that less programmers need to work on maintenance, so they can work on developing new products instead. In order to compare the use of the FRP paradigm to the one currently used in the base station implementation, the object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm, a second prototype using this paradigm was also implemented. Having two prototypes implementing the same designed reference model (which is a simplified version of the Radio Resource Control connection setup procedure) enables a relevant comparison of the two paradigms. The two prototypes were then compared in terms of performance and maintainability. The maintainability evaluation consisted in using both software metrics and experts’ assessment, as this has been proven to be the most efficient way to evaluate software maintainability. Four experts were asked to fill in a questionnaire after reviewing the code of the two implementations. The comparison of the two prototypes indicates that the FRP prototype is more maintainable than the OOP one, but the OOP prototype has better performances than the FRP one. Moreover, the performance of the FRP prototype during the conducted tests indicates that such an implementation of the FRP paradigm is not suitable for a real base station.