EMF Exposure in 5G Standalone mm-Wave Deployments: What Is the Impact of Downlink Traffic?

The rolling-out of 5G networks is recently including 5G Base Stations (BSs) operating on millimeter-Wave (mm-Wave) frequencies. The goal of this work is to shed light on the exposure assessment from commercial 5G mm-Wave 5G BSs, by focusing on the impact of downlink traffic on the exposure levels. To this aim, we adopt an innovative measurement framework, based on hardware and software components, able to satisfy the challenging measurement requirements of mm-Wave frequencies. In addition, we design a completely softwarized algorithm, called M-WAVE, in order to measure the mm-Wave exposure with a programmable spectrum analyzer. Results, obtained from a commercial 5G scenario, reveal that the exposure from the mm-Wave BS is directly proportional to the amount of traffic injected on the wireless link. However, the electric field is always lower than 0.08 V/m, while the downlink traffic is even larger than 800 Mbps.