Paper Info
Title
Not in My Neighborhood: A User Equipment Perspective of Cellular Planning Under Restrictive EMF Limits.
Abstract
The installation of base station (BS) sites is regulated by a variety of laws at international, national, and local levels. While international regulations are already severe, the national and local laws applied in many countries and regions follow precautionary principles and enforce electromagnetic field (EMF) constraints that are even more restrictive. This legal environment results in substantial constraints affecting the planning of cellular networks, as requests for new BS site installation are easily denied by national or local authorities. In this paper, we consider the problem of cellular planning under restrictive EMF limits from the user equipment (UE) viewpoint. We focus on outdoor urban areas and first evaluate the impact of the current, non-optimal network planning at the UE side through a quantitative measurement-driven analysis of the quality of service (QoS) observed by users in heterogeneous, large-scale urban scenarios. We then perform a qualitative assessment of the perceived QoS and generated EMF levels at one UE transferring data from/to a BS based on its position with respect to the serving BS. Finally, we run a what-if analysis by comparing the existing planning with the one where new BS sites can be installed, thanks to a relaxation of the restrictive EMF constraints. Our results clearly show that a cellular planning driven by restrictive EMF constraints forces UE to experience large distances from the serving BS, frequent non-line-of-sight conditions, and poor received signal. In turn, this entails a very negative combination of high electric field activity (EFA) levels generated by the UE and low QoS perceived by the user. We show that, by relaxing the restrictive EMF constraints, the problem could be sensibly mitigated with a positive impact on the UE channel conditions and consequently on the perceived QoS and the UE EFA.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2888916
IEEE ACCESS
Keywords
Field
DocType
Cellular network planning,EMF limits,impact on QoS,user equipment measurements
Base station,Network planning and design,Computer science,Communication channel,Computer network,Quality of service,User equipment,Cellular network
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
7
2169-3536
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Luca Chiaraviglio176855.95
Jaime Galán-Jiménez22811.00
Marco Fiore323421.89
Nicola Blefari-Melazzi4135.40