Comparative analysis of personal exposure levels induced by long-term evolution 1800 Re-farming and other RF sources in an urban environment

Narrowband analysis of real-life up-link (UL) and down-link (DL) trends in personal exposure to recently installed long-term evolution 1800 and other radio frequency sources in typical everyday environments is presented in this work. Results are derived by analysis and post-processing of experimental dataset consisting of 1,677,600 measurement samples, taken at a sampling frequency of 0.25Hz. The electric field measurements were collected with calibrated personal exposure meters at 90 urban spots, including outdoor and indoor microenvironments. A robust regression from order statistics was applied, enabling the determination of more reliable mean exposure values (V/m) for each wireless and broadcast technology and microenvironment. The exposure ratio for global system for mobile communications (GSM)+long-term evolution (LTE) 1800 (UL) and GSM+LTE 1800 (down link, DL) varied between 0.004 and 0.546% in outdoor environments. The maximal electric field value for the GSM+LTE 900 (DL) was 1.77V/m, while for GSM+LTE 1800 (DL) this value was 0.644V/m. The cumulative distribution function of the total radio frequency exposure for the various microenvironments is presented. The research results confirm that exposure levels in an urban environment even after the LTE 1800 Re-farming deployment are far below the International Commission on Non-ionising Radiation Protection reference levels.