Stochastic Dosimetry Assessment of Human RF-EMF Spatial Exposure Variability in 5G-V2X Vehicular Communication Scenario

The present work was focused on assessing the spatial exposure variability for pedestrians on the road, in close proximity to a car equipped with a 5G-V2X antenna, operating at the working frequency of 3.5 GHz and with 3D beamforming capability. Indeed, Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) will soon utilize 5G New-Radio (NR) wireless communication to overcome the limitations of the current V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) wireless communication technologies, enhancing road-safety and driving efficiency. However, this transition also introduces heterogeneity, uncertainty and variability in the radio frequency (RF) exposure levels of pedestrian and other road-users. To evaluate the spatial exposure variability in these new 5G-V2X scenarios, in this work we adopted an approach which combines a stochastic (metamodeling) technique called Polynomial Chaos Kriging with deterministic dosimetry (classical computation techniques). By utilizing this approach, we were able to assess the exposure levels, expressed in terms of specific absorption rate (SAR), for 1000 different beamforming patterns of the 5G-V2X antenna, with low computational cost. The results showed low exposure values compared to ICNIRP guidelines and highlighted a high exposure variability for 5G vehicular communication scenarios.