A UTD/FDTD investigation on procedures to assess compliance of cellular base-station antennas with human-exposure limits in a realistic urban environment

In this paper, different exposure situations for a subject standing inside a room of a building with a window facing a rooftop-mounted base-station antenna are analyzed. The study is accomplished by using a technique combining the uniform asymptotic theory of diffraction and the finite-difference time-domain method, suitable to characterize human exposure in realistic urban environments at a reasonable computational cost. The different exposure conditions examined are analyzed to highlight the problems related to compliance assessment procedures in complex exposure scenarios and to suggest some possible solutions. A comparison of the results obtained in these scenarios with those computed neglecting the presence of the room walls (free-space situations) evidences that, under certain conditions, average exposure field levels and specific absorption rates (SARs) in the realistic environments can be higher than in free space, thus demonstrating that compliance assessment carried out in free space can yield nonconservative results. As concerns implications of field nonuniformities, typical of realistic urban environments, on SAR values, the results show that the whole-body averaged SAR is related to the average field value, provided the averaging procedure is appropriately chosen to cover all the volume occupied by the subject (V(S)) and not only a vertical surface. Local SAR values, instead, show a more complex relation with the exposure field, such that considering only the V(S)-averaged field value for compliance assessment might lead to an underestimation of the real exposure level, while using the peak of the field in V(S) leads to a remarkable overestimation.