Dominance of Smartphone Exposure in 5G Mobile Networks

TL;DR

This study introduces a novel framework for measuring 5G exposure, revealing that smartphone emissions surpass base station signals, especially in outdoor settings, with line-of-sight conditions significantly reducing overall exposure.

Contribution

The paper presents the 5G-EA framework, an innovative measurement algorithm for assessing smartphone and base station EMF exposure in 5G networks.

Findings

Smartphone exposure dominates over RBS exposure during uplink traffic.

Line-of-Sight locations reduce overall exposure by about tenfold.

5G exposure accounts for up to 38% of total smartphone radiation.

Abstract

The deployment of 5G networks is sometimes questioned due to the impact of ElectroMagnetic Field (EMF) generated by Radio Base Station (RBS) on users. The goal of this work is to analyze such issue from a novel perspective, by comparing RBS EMF against exposure generated by 5G smartphones in commercial deployments. The measurement of exposure from 5G is hampered by several implementation aspects, such as dual connectivity between 4G and 5G, spectrum fragmentation, and carrier aggregation. To face such issues, we deploy a novel framework, called 5G-EA, tailored to the assessment of smartphone and RBS exposure through an innovative measurement algorithm, able to remotely control a programmable spectrum analyzer. Results, obtained in both outdoor and indoor locations, reveal that smartphone exposure (upon generation of uplink traffic) dominates over the RBS one. Moreover, Line-of-Sight locations experience a reduction of around one order of magnitude on the overall exposure compared to Non-Line-of-Sight ones. In addition, 5G exposure always represents a small share (up to 38%) compared to the total one radiated by the smartphone.