Bestoun S. Ahmed , Amin S. Mohammad , and Hemin T. Essa
Software Engineering Research Group, Software Engineering Department, Engineering College,Salahaddin University
Abstract
Generally, combinatorial design concerns with the arrangement of finite set of elements into
patterns (subsets, words, arrays) according to specified rules. The usefulness of this design method is
that the number of input combination can be reduced dramatically but all of them are covered by
the combinatorial set. This paper presents the application of this design method in communication
networks. Communication engineers can use this novel method to generate test cases for producing
cost-effective set of experiments to recognize the factors that have the least and most impact on the
system's performance. A well-known scenario is used for the purpose of the experiment and five
factors with different values are chosen to qualify their effect on the network performance. The
experimental set is generated using combinatorial design method and then it is been used to analyze
the effect of each factor. The experiments showed the effectiveness of the method to be used for
analyzing the effect of factors on communication network.
Keywords: Communication networks; combinatorial design; software testing; performance evaluation;
network design; design of experiments
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