Abstract
In the near future, wireless coverage will be provided by the base stations equipped with dynamically-controlled massive phased antenna arrays that direct the transmission towards the user. This contribution describes a computational method to estimate realistic maximum power levels produced by such base stations, in terms of the time-averaged normalized antenna array gain. The Ray-Tracing method is used to simulate the electromagnetic field (EMF) propagation in an urban outdoor macro-cell environment model. The model geometry entities are generated stochastically, which allowed generalization of the results through statistical analysis. Multiple modes of the base station operation are compared: from LTE multi-user codebook beamforming to the more advanced Maximum Ratio and Zero-Forcing precoding schemes foreseen to be implemented in the massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) communication protocols. The influence of the antenna array size, from 4 up to 100 elements, in a square planar arrangement is studied. For a 64-element array, the 95th percentile of the maximum time-averaged array gain amounts to around 20% of the theoretical maximum, using the Maximum Ratio precoding with 5 simultaneously connected users, assuming a 10 s connection duration per user. Connection between the average array gain and actual EMF levels in the environment is drawn and its implications on the human exposure in the next generation networks are discussed.
Highlights
The much anticipated roll-out of the fifth-generation (5G) telecommunication networks brings about new challenges associated with limiting the exposure of the general population and workers to electromagnetic fields (EMF)
The DOD of each time-averaged gain sample is depicted with a black circle in the (φ, θ) coordinate system
And its opacity is proportional to the number of samples observed at the corresponding DOD
Summary
The much anticipated roll-out of the fifth-generation (5G) telecommunication networks brings about new challenges associated with limiting the exposure of the general population and workers to electromagnetic fields (EMF). One of the key universal features of the next-generation networks, shared among various 5G technologies, is the use of large antenna arrays at the base station (BS) side [1]. The radiation pattern of an antenna array depends on the amplitude and phase ratios of the array elements. By selecting the elements’ amplitudes and phases in a specific way, a BS can produce directed “beams” in its far-field—the main lobes of the array radiation pattern.
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