A Distributed Multiagent System Architecture for Body Area Networks Applied to Healthcare Monitoring

Table 1

Chidamber and Kemerer metrics analyzed in our system.

Metric	Description
Weighted methods per class (WMC)	Measures the complexity of the each class based on the sum of the cyclomatic complexity of each of class’s methods.
Depth of inheritance tree (DIT)	Measures the inheritance level of each class. A high DIT number means class extension is more prone to error as each intermediate class introduces new methods and variables whose access must be controlled. Faults also become harder to detect.
Number of children (NOC)	It counts the number of immediate child classes each class has. A class with a high NOC is very hard to change (or update) due to the number of classes reusing it.
Coupling between object classes (CBO)	Measures the relationship between classes and how dependent they are of each other. A high coupling rate is unwanted in a very modular system such as the presented in this work.; Additionally, two submetrics of CBO can be also computed: afferent couplings (Ca) that measures the number of classes that use each class and efferent couplings (Ce) that indicates the number of other classes being used by each class.
Response for a class (RFC)	Stands for the potential number of methods that can be called when one of the class’s methods is invoked. In this test, a special importance is given to remote methods, as they not only increase the complexity of the class but also augment class coupling.