SysML based Design for Variability enabling the Reusability of Legacy Systems towards the support of Diverse Standard Compliant Implementations or Standard Updates: The Case of IEEE-802.15.6 Standard for e-Health Applications

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to provide a consistent development path enabling the re-usability of in house legacy systems or architectures towards their re-design, in order to ensure compliance with evolving standards, by using the new features of SysML for modelling variants. Modern standards evolve quickly, include advanced functionalities and operations and support diverse implementations. System industries need to cope with such standards changes by modifying their current technologies. This paper shows how a novel engineering process (SysML modelling) could be employed to define consistently the specification and the migration procedure of legacy systems to their variants. Within this work SysML characteristics such as package and block diagrams, are employed, with an emphasis on variability modelling, as a basis for standard compliant architecture implementation, thus providing design flexibility and reusability at several abstraction levels. As an illustration of our proposed method we present models of two variant Physical Layer structures for IEEE-802.15.6 Standard for e-Health Applications. The advanced SysML features are used to target the re-usability of a legacy Narrow-Band (NB) physical layer subsystem for the Wireless Body Area Network standard and to implement the alternative Ultra-Wide Band (UWB). Therefore, we contend that such methods bring potential benefits to those needing to ensure compliance when producing product variants.