Massive Measurements of 5G Exposure in a Town: Methodology and Results

• Main Authors: Luca Chiaraviglio, Chiara Lodovisi, Daniele Franci, Settimio Pavoncello, Tommaso Aureli, Nicola Blefari-Melazzi, Mohamed-Slim Alouini
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2021-01-01
• Series: IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society
• Subjects: 5G cellular networks; 5G EMF measurements; coverage analysis
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9521570/

We target the problem of performing a large set of measurements over the territory to characterize the exposure from a 5G deployment. Since using a single Spectrum Analyzer (SA) is not practically feasible (due to the limited battery duration), in this work we adopt an integrated approach, based on the massive measurement of 5G metrics with a 5G smartphone, followed by a detailed analysis done with the SA and an ElectroMagnetic Field (EMF) meter in selected locations. Results, obtained over a real territory covered by 5G signal, reveal that 5G exposure is overall very limited for most of measurement locations, both in terms of field strength (up to 0.7 [V/m]) and as share w.r.t. other wireless technologies (typically lower than 15%). Moreover, our approach allows easily spotting measurement outliers, e.g., due to the exploitation of Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) techniques between 4G and 5G. In addition, the exposure metrics collected with the smartphone are overall a good proxy of the total exposure measured over the whole 5G channel. Moreover, the sight conditions and the distance from 5G base station play a great role in determining the level of exposure. Finally, a maximum of 130 [W] of power radiated by a 5G base station is estimated in the scenario under consideration.