On the Reliability of Extrapolation Techniques for Verifying the Compliance of LTE Cellular Systems with RF Human Exposure Limits

The evaluation of RF human exposure is a hot topic both from a medical and engineering point of view. Because of Non-Ionizing RF fields have been classified possibly carcinogenic to humans, international and national authorities have established some exposure limits. To assess an exposure limit violation, accurate procedures to measure the electromagnetic field emitted by radio base stations are proposed in many standards and studies. This matter is subject to a continuous evolution, trying to following the innovations introduced by new wireless communication standards. This work focuses its attention to the assessment of human exposure to LTE communication technology. Recently, an extrapolation technique for maximal LTE radio base station (BS) exposure estimation has been proposed and adopted in some standards. This paper analyzes, with an experimental campaign, the reliability of this techniques and the influences of the averaging time setting on the obtained results. The final aim of this research activity is to provide useful information for improving the reliability of the results.