Statistical Characterization and Modeling of Indoor RF-EMF Down-Link Exposure

Abstract

With the increasing use of wireless communication systems, assessment of exposure to radio-frequency electromagnetic field (RF-EMF) has now become very important due to the rise of public risk perception. Since people spend more than 70% of their daily time in indoor environments, including home, office, and car, the efforts devoted to indoor RF-EMF exposure assessment has also increased. However, assessment of indoor exposure to RF-EMF using a deterministic approach is challenging and time consuming task as it is affected by uncertainties due to the complexity of the indoor environment and furniture structure, existence of multiple reflection, refraction, diffraction and scattering, temporal variability of exposure, and existence of many obstructions with unknown dielectric properties. Moreover, it is also affected by the existence of uncontrolled factors that can influence the indoor RF-EMF exposure such as the constant movement of people and random movement of furniture and doors as people are working in the building. In this study, a statistical approach is utilized to characterize and model the total indoor RF-EMF down-link (DL) exposure from all cellular bands on each floor over the length of a wing since the significance of distance is very low between any two points on each floor in a wing and the variation of RF-EMF DL exposure is mainly influenced by the local indoor environment. Measurements were conducted in three buildings that are located within a few hundred meters vicinity of two base station sites supporting several cellular technologies (2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G). We apply the one-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test on the measurement data, and we prove that the indoor RF-EMF DL exposure on each floor over the length of a wing is a random process governed by a Gaussian distribution. We validate this proposition using leave-one-out cross validation technique. Consequently, we conclude that the indoor RF-EMF DL exposure on each floor over the length of a wing can be modeled by a Gaussian distribution and, therefore, can be characterized by the mean and the standard deviation parameters.