Prediction of RF-EMF Exposure by Outdoor Drive Test Measurements

In this paper, we exploit the artificial neural network (ANN) model for a spatial reconstruction of radio-frequency (RF) electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure in an outdoor urban environment. To this end, we have carried out a drive test measurement campaign covering a large part of Paris, along a ro...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shanshan Wang, Taghrid Mazloum, Joe Wiart
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2022-06-01
Series:Telecom
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4001/3/3/21
Description
Summary:In this paper, we exploit the artificial neural network (ANN) model for a spatial reconstruction of radio-frequency (RF) electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure in an outdoor urban environment. To this end, we have carried out a drive test measurement campaign covering a large part of Paris, along a route of approximately 65 Km. The electric (E) field strength has been recorded over a wide band ranging from 700 to 2700 MHz. From these measurement data, the E-field strength is extracted and computed for each frequency band of each telecommunication operator. First, the correlation between the E-fields at different frequency bands is computed and analyzed. The results show that a strong correlation of E-field levels is observed for bands belonging to the same operator. Then, we build ANN models with input data encompassing information related to distances to <i>N</i> neighboring base stations (BS), receiver location and time variation. We consider two different models. The first one is a fully connected ANN model, where we take into account the <i>N</i> nearest BSs ignoring the corresponding operator. The second one is a hybrid model, where we consider locally connected blocks with the <i>N</i> nearest BSs for each operator, followed by fully connected layers. The results show that the hybrid model achieves better performance than the fully connected one. Among <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mi>N</mi><mo>∈</mo><mo>{</mo><mn>3</mn><mo>,</mo><mn>5</mn><mo>,</mo><mn>7</mn><mo>}</mo></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>, we found out that with <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mi>N</mi><mo>=</mo><mn>3</mn></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>, the proposed hybrid model allows a good prediction of the exposure level while the maintaining acceptable complexity of the model.
ISSN:2673-4001