Joint Metrics for EMF Exposure and Coverage in Real-World Homogeneous and Inhomogeneous Cellular Networks

TL;DR

This paper models and analyzes the trade-off between coverage and electromagnetic field exposure in cellular networks using stochastic geometry, validated with real-world datasets and applicable to various network types.

Contribution

It introduces a unified stochastic geometry framework for evaluating EMFE and coverage in both homogeneous and inhomogeneous cellular networks, including real-world validation.

Findings

Joint distributions of EMFE and coverage are derived and validated.

Inhomogeneous Poisson models approximate motion-variant networks effectively.

Trade-offs between coverage and EMFE are quantitatively analyzed.

Abstract

This paper evaluates the downlink performance of cellular networks in terms of coverage and electromagnetic field exposure (EMFE), in the framework of stochastic geometry. The model is constructed based on datasets for sub-6~GHz macro cellular networks but it is general enough to be applicable to millimeter-wave networks as well. On the one hand, performance metrics are calculated for $\beta$-Ginibre point processes which are shown to faithfully model a large number of motion-invariant networks. On the other hand, performance metrics are derived for inhomogeneous Poisson point processes with a radial intensity measure, which are shown to be a good approximation for motion-variant networks. For both cases, joint and marginal distributions of the EMFE and the coverage, and the first moments of the EMFE are provided and validated by Monte Carlo simulations using realistic sets of parameters from two sub-6~GHz macro urban cellular networks, i.e., 5G~NR~2100 (Paris, France) and LTE~1800 (Brussels, Belgium) datasets. In addition, this paper includes the analysis of the impact of the network parameters and discusses the achievable trade-off between coverage and EMFE.