A formalistic method for the performance evaluation of communication networks of distributed computing systems

The authors describe a method for the performance evaluation of communication networks of distributed systems. This method consists of: logical transition from the network architecture under consideration to an associated Petri net based model and adaptation to a generalized stochastic Petri net (GSPN); automatic generation of the state transition rate diagram of a Markov Chain (MC) from the reachability graph of GSPN due to isomorphism between the stochastic Petri nets and homogeneous MC; computation of the steady state probabilities which are used for the evaluation of system performance indices. The method was implemented in a software package. An application of this method to performance evaluation of a simple three-processor system with distributed common memory is also presented.<
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