Pencil Beamforming Increases Human Exposure to ElectroMagnetic Fields: True or False?
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According to a very popular belief - very widespread among non-scientific communities - the exploitation of narrow beams, a.k.a. "pencil beamforming", will dramatically increase the exposure levels radiated by 5G Base Stations. To face such concern with a scientific approach, in this work we derive a simple yet meaningful model to evaluate the ElectroMagnetic Field (EMF) exposure from a set of 5G Base Stations employing pencil beamforming. Results, obtained by coding our model in a publicly released open-source simulator, dispel the myth: pencil beamforming allows to radically reduce the exposure w.r.t. the case in which no beamforming is exploited. In addition, we show that a tuning of the pencil beams based on the uncertainty level for localizing the User Equipment plays a key role in limiting the number of overlapping beams, and therefore the exposure levels experienced over the territory.
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