Measurement and simulation of radio wave propagation in hospitals

This paper investigates radio wave propagation in hospitals. In contrast to other buildings, hospitals are partly constructed of walls that contain metallic layers in their structure. The type of wall depends on the functionality of the room. Measurements were performed at eight discrete frequencies in the range from 42.6 MHz up to 5.2 GHz in all relevant types of rooms such as operating rooms, X-ray, MRT (magnet resonance tomograph) and others. Due to the large frequency range and in order to investigate extensively the wave propagation properties, various antennas and measurement systems were used. The results show a different behavior of the wave propagation in different rooms of the hospital. Furthermore the results reveal that it is important to consider the room as a whole when determining the attenuation between adjacent rooms. For EM-wave propagation in rooms with metallic layers, slots and openings in the walls are crucial. The measurement data is further used to find a suitable modeling of the walls for simulations with ray-optical methods. The walls are homogeneously modeled with multiple layers of different material parameters. This makes it possible to model walls in hospitals with embedded metallic shieldings. The results of the simulations agree well with the measurements.