Wireless communication is now considered an integral and indispensable part of our everyday lives. The continuously increasing demand for connectivity and the large number of emerging innovative industrial applications are driving the development of fifth-generation (5G) networks and the enthusiasm for their deployment. Globally, mobile data traffic is expected to grow by 40% per year!

The rapid rollout of 5G networks in countries around the world is raising public concern about human exposure to radiation generated by the new technologies.

In Europe, there are regulations in place that curb the level of radiation. Compliance with existing regulations is usually evaluated by direct measurement of radiation in an operational network, using standardized measurement procedures.

"However, recently deployed 5G networks have yet to reach their full potential in terms of data traffic, which means that measurement results cannot yet be representative," says Sergei.

"In addition, the current measurement procedures were developed for the 2G-4G networks, which means that they first need to be updated in order to correctly evaluate 5G specificities," continues Sergei.

"Therefore, in addition to measurements, numerical simulations are frequently used to predict human exposure. But again, no profoundly adapted method has been proposed so far," Sergei says.

"In my PhD, I developed improved numerical simulations to arrive at realistic predictions of human exposure to 5G radiation," concludes Sergei.

Read a more detailed summary or the entire PhD

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PhD Title: Human Electromagnetic Field Exposure from Ultra Small Cell and Massive MIMO Technologies

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Sergei Shikhantsov received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Applied Physics and Mathematics from Moscow Institute (State University) of Physics and Technology (Moscow, Russia), in 2014 and 2016, respectively. In his Bachelor studies, he was working on the numerical simulations of the electromagnetic field and the electron beam tracing for construction of the charged particle accelerator beam diagnostics device. During his Master studies, he was working on the numerical methods for monocular machine vision and authored one conference paper.

Late in 2016, he moved on to join the WAVES research group at Ghent University (Ghent, Belgium), where he started his Ph.D. in Engineering Physics. His research activities focused on applying the methods of computational electrodynamics to develop novel numerical approaches for assessment of the human electromagnetic field exposure and propagation modelling of future wireless networks.

During his Ph.D. research, he appeared as the first author of five publications in international peer-reviewed journals, and presented his results at six international conferences. In addition, he contributed as a co-author to three publications in international journals.

Contact: Sergei Shikhantsov, Piet Demeester, Wout Joseph

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Editor: Jeroen Ongenae - Illustrator: Roger Van Hecke