EMF Exposure Assessment of Massive MIMO Radio Base Stations Based on Traffic Beam Pattern Envelopes

This paper investigates the applicability of the far-field spherical formula to estimate EMF compliance boundaries (exclusion zones) for massive MIMO radio base stations characterized by a large number of antenna elements. Numerical and measurement-based methods were implemented and compared. The results show that knowledge of the traffic beam pattern envelope is sufficient to accurately assess the EMF exposure and determine the compliance boundary for a radio base station product at distances far smaller than the traditional far-field distance.