Experiences in Making Architectural Decisions during the Development of a New Base Station Platform

Creating architecture for a complex telecommunication system is a difficult task and requires expertise of many different stakeholders. The software architecture design process relies on understanding the architecturally significant requirements (ASRs) for the system under design. This paper describes experiences in creating a new base station product line. A goal was to create a process to facilitate fulfillment of ASRs during the development of the product line. The approach proved to be feasible for developing large-scale systems in the telecommunications infrastructure domain. This paper describes the approach taken, experiences gathered during the development process and promotes the idea of defining concrete ASRs for each project and refining them through architecture for all relevant subsystems.