Time Averaged Transmitter Power and Exposure to Electromagnetic Fields from Mobile Phone Base Stations

Alfred Bürgi, Damiano Scanferla and Hugo Lehmann
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Alfred Bürgi: ARIAS umwelt.forschung.beratung, Gutenbergstrasse 40B, CH-3011 Bern, Switzerland
Damiano Scanferla: Swisscom (Switzerland) Ltd., Innovation, Mobile Access, Ey. 10, CH-3063 Ittigen, Switzerland
Hugo Lehmann: Swisscom (Switzerland) Ltd., Innovation, Mobile Access, Ey. 10, CH-3063 Ittigen, Switzerland

IJERPH, 2014, vol. 11, issue 8, 1-13

Abstract: Models for exposure assessment of high frequency electromagnetic fields from mobile phone base stations need the technical data of the base stations as input. One of these parameters, the Equivalent Radiated Power (ERP), is a time-varying quantity, depending on communication traffic. In order to determine temporal averages of the exposure, corresponding averages of the ERP have to be available. These can be determined as duty factors, the ratios of the time-averaged power to the maximum output power according to the transmitter setting. We determine duty factors for UMTS from the data of 37 base stations in the Swisscom network. The UMTS base stations sample contains sites from different regions of Switzerland and also different site types (rural/suburban/urban/hotspot). Averaged over all regions and site types, a UMTS duty factor for the 24 h-average is obtained, i.e. , the average output power corresponds to about a third of the maximum power. We also give duty factors for GSM based on simple approximations and a lower limit for LTE estimated from the base load on the signalling channels.

Keywords: radio frequency electromagnetic fields; EMF exposure assessment; EMF modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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