Network Characteristics of Urban Environments for Wireless BAN

The fast growing elderly population has rendered a need for cheaper and better healthcare. Answering this call are advances in information technology and medical sciences. At the information technology end, wireless body area networks (WBAN) are being developed to support continuous and ubiquitous monitoring of patients. In our previous work, we identified the importance of the environment in the design of WBAN. Therefore, we characterize the effects of the urban environment on networking with these low power communication devices. We begin by observing the effects of some less studied factors, such as height of devices and impact of human contact on the antenna. We then present results on the characterization of two environments, namely residential housing and the university campus. Our results show that despite WiFi being omnipresent, its impact on reception probability is not significant. Thus, there is no preferred channel to operate a WBAN.