Page 45 - Methodology for measurement of Quality of Service (QoS) Key Performance Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Digital Financial Services

II.3 MAPPING OF ACQUIRED DATA TO FORMAL scription, or to the mobile device. For the tests, the
TRIGGER POINTS USSD code *135# has been chosen which queries the
own telephone number. In addition, using a code, which
By comparison to the full trigger point list shown in in relates directly to DFS, should not be used, as this may
Table 4-2, the timestamps used in the Ghana pilot cam- bring the DFS system into undesired states. Suitable
paign, as shown in Table II 1 are a subset (see the full dis- USSD codes would serve as suitable proxies for the
cussion of consequences of manual execution of tests functioning of the USSD subsystem in the network un-
in clause 7). Consequently, a mapping of timer flags to der test, without having undesired side effects.
formal trigger points needs to be done and is shown in For the choice of web sites, small sites were selected,
Table II-1. i.e. the Google search engine start page, and the ETSI
Please note that there are no format trigger points Kepler for Smartphones page hosted on a reference
6
for T4 and T5, as they are not linked to events from the server.
activity flow in a DFS implementation. In case of T4, it Even though the DFS implementation in Ghana uses
will be set from a failure indication given by the DFS im- USSD and SMS as its principal carrier services, packet
plementation which cannot be provoked directly from A data related test cases have been added to collect some
or B side, but needs to be interpreted as part of human potentially useful additional information.
or automated monitoring of the test. In case of T5, it is After some validation tests, it has been determined
set by a time-out condition determined by some exter- that using a data server in Germany (hosted at Focus
nal time-keeping process.
Infocom) provides the best operational value also with
respect to maintenance. During the pre-pilot phase, a
II.4 BACKGROUND TESTING OF THE TRANS- second server (at Strato, a large German web hosting
PORT NETWORK system) has been tested and verified to work. This was
done to make sure a fallback solution is available in case
For SMS testing, sending SMS to the same device is of server problems during the campaign.
used to simplify data capture.
For USSD testing, a code (or multiple codes) should
not make permanent changes to the state of the sub-

Table II-1: Reference table: Ghana campaign timestamps to formal trigger points
TIMESTAMP FORMAL TRIGGER POINT REMARKS
T1 AA_100 Start of test case execution
T2 AA_200 Start of core transaction
T3 AE_300 Successful completion of transaction
T4 Used as failure indicator
T5 Used as timeout indicator
T6 AE_310 Reception of information SMS on A side
T7 BE_320 Reception of information SMS on B side

Methodology for measurement of Quality of Service (QoS) Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Digital Financial Services • 43Methodology for measurement of Quality of Service (QoS) Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Digital Financial Services • 43