Researchers suggest that movable airborne antennas for reception of EMF signals can reduce the user’s exposure to high-frequency EMF waves.
Wireless communication technologies like 5G are said to harm humans due to their high frequency range. A solution has been proposed by masters student Zhengying Lou, postdoc Ahmed Elzanaty and distinguished professor Mohamed-Slim Alouini of KAUST to address the widespread public concern about EMF exposure from mobile networks.
According to him, movable airborne antennas receiving cell phone signals could reduce EMF exposure while offering higher data transmission speed and using less power.
The idea of mobile tethered drones might offer a speedy and environmentally friendly alternative for receiving terrestrial base stations while alleviating public concerns about exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMF).
Elzanaty says that although most public concern focuses on exposure to EMF from network base stations—the towers located on high buildings and dotted across the rural landscape— the EMF exposure due to the radiation from mobile phones can be much higher than that from base stations. The researchers suggest that their tethered unmanned aerial vehicles (TUAVs) would act to receive these EMF signals, thereby reducing the users’ uplink exposure.
“Although the TUAVs would be closer to the users than the base stations, they would employ existing technology of low power ‘green antennas’ that only receive signals and so do not radiate any EMF,” Lou says.
“While research into possible risks of EMF exposure continues, our novel airborne green antennas-based architecture could allow the race towards new 6G mobile systems to continue while decreasing the exposure to EMF,” Elzanaty concludes.
The research appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking.
