Will the Proliferation of 5G Base Stations Increase the Radio-Frequency "Pollution"?

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple model to evaluate how 5G base station deployment density affects radio-frequency pollution, showing dense deployments can significantly reduce pollution near users, with some scenarios causing slight increases.

Contribution

It introduces a straightforward analytical model to assess RFP changes with different 5G deployment strategies, providing closed-form expressions for comparison.

Findings

Dense 5G deployments reduce RFP near users by up to three orders of magnitude.

Increasing user equipment signal thresholds can cause slight RFP increases.

Dense deployments benefit users close to base stations with lower pollution levels.

Abstract

A common concern among the population is that installing new 5G Base Stations (BSs) over a given geographic region may result in an uncontrollable increase of Radio-Frequency "Pollution" (RFP). To face this dispute in a way that can be understood by the layman, we develop a very simple model, which evaluates the RFP at selected distances between the user and the 5G BS locations. We then obtain closed-form expressions to quantify the RFP increase/decrease when comparing a pair of alternative 5G deployments. Results show that a dense 5G deployment is beneficial to the users living in proximity to the 5G BSs, with an abrupt decrease of RFP (up to three orders of magnitude) compared to a sparse deployment. We also analyze scenarios where the user equipment minimum detectable signal threshold is increased, showing that in such cases a (slight) increase of RFP may be experienced.