Reduction of Radiation Exposure from Cellular Base Stations by Joint Time Scheduling and Power Controlling

Radiation hazard from rapidly increasing base stations (BSs) of cellular networks is a burning issue of the day. In this paper, the problem of reduction of radiation from mobile phone BSs is considered. First, a traditional cellular system is considered where the transmit power at the BSs is fixed. For the traditional system, the radiation exposure to the cell phone users is determined by using an analytical model. It is found that the radiation exposure to the users does not exceed the related IEEE standards but it is higher than the precautionary limits set in some countries. It is also found that a user receives most of the radiation power from its nearest BS and the increment of radiation exposure for reducing the antenna height is significant to those users who are suffering higher radiation. Next, a power control and user scheduling scheme is proposed to reduce the radiation exposure to the users. Analytical models are developed to configure the transmit power and user scheduling parameters for reducing the power density to the users by satisfying the traffic of the users. A model to calculate the power density to the users under the proposed scheme is also developed. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated and compared with the traditional scheme. Comparison results show that the reduction of the power density to the mobile phone users by the proposed scheme is remarkable.