5G Planning under EMF Constraints

The planning of a 5G cellular network requires the installation of 5G Base Station (BS) sites and the configuration of each BS. This process takes into account several constraints, including the ElectroMagnetic Fields (EMF) levels radiated by the installed BSs. Different countries in the world (including Italy) adopt EMF constraints which are much stricter than the ones prescribed by international organization. The resulting planning is far away to be optimal, resulting in an increase of the CAPital EXpenditures (CAPEX) costs for the operator, and a decrease of the user Quality of Service (QoS). In this chapter, we shed light on this problem. After reporting the related work, we discuss the impact of strict EMF constraints on the 5G planning through a set of representative examples. We then report the outcomes from two case studies. Results clearly show that a saturation of EMF levels, preventing the installation of 5G BS sites, is already reached in currently deployed networks. In addition, we also quantify that the negative impact of the non-optimal planning on the user QoS. Finally, we discuss the expected impact of the main 5G technology features on the EMF levels.