MUDCOM: Cost Modeling Framework for Design of Telecommunications Software Systems

Virtual prototyping for large scalable systems such as networks and services are inherently expensive. On the other hand, extensive multi-domain simulation and virtual prototyping based design can be a beneficial from quality of design perspective. Thus detailed prototyping for a system under design is often a question of design economics. In this paper, we create a cost modeling framework (MUDCOM) which may help choose a prototyping based design approach based on the characteristics of the system. The proposed cost modeling framework is an estimator for cost of different life-stages of a product. Before embarking on a complex endeavor of multi-domain virtual prototype development, impact of such a model on the overall life-cycle cost can be evaluated using MUDCOM. MUDCOM integrates a series of existing cost modeling ideas and extends it for telecommunications network and services. The paper describes different component of the framework and uses a communications service design as a case study to demonstrate the framework