Modeling non functional requirements in designing middleware for pervasive healthcare system

Pervasive healthcare systems (PHSs) are mission-critical systems that require high quality support of non functional attributes (NFAs). For a specific service of system, many different off-the-shelf components based on various protocols and algorithms may be developed. Choosing appropriate components and setting their configuration parameters in optimal form based on the application type and end-user's non functional requirements is a big challenge. Main objective of this paper is modeling of this process. Proposed method models the system in three different level of abstraction. Modeling of the components characteristics and configurations is considered in lower layer of the model. Effect of configurations of components on the NFAs of system nodes are considered in the second level of model. Studying the effect of nodes interconnections and NFAs of devices on total NFAs of the system is done in top layer. Analytic hierarchy process is suggested for determining relative importance degree of various NFAs in the different level of system modeling. An optimization process after modeling tries to find best components and their setting for achieving optimum measures for NFAs of PHS.