Performance, distribution, and development of Ericsson composition engine

The Ericsson Composition Engine (ECE) is an open, versatile and future proof application platform enabling service providers to easily create and combine new and existing Value Added Service applications, regardless of vendor and access technology. To improve the performance of ECE in future versions, during this project, the following area was required to be investigated: • ECE performance: Specific suggestions, preferably demonstrated, for performance improvement. • ECE distribution: What is the best approach/architecture to handle ECE scalability? • New execution agent design: How to make it possible to add a new execution agent to ECE at runtime without recompiling and restarting the service. After the project, we provided our investigation results: • The actor model could not help to improve the performance of the core of ECE. The shared state is the bottleneck of ECE because it was shared by all the sessions and may even be accessed across clusters. • There already existed an approach and architecture to handle ECE scalability and load balance. They are good enough. However, within this solution, the session application component should be carefully used. It spends around 25% CPU time which is not always necessary for REST-ful services of ECE. • The design of new execution agent was made and implemented by applying Akka's remote actors. The new design allowed execution agents to be added to or to be removed from the composition engine at runtime without increasing the communication time between the core of ECE and execution agents compared to the current design.