Designing green wireless access networks: Optimizing towards power consumption versus exposure of human beings

When developing future networks, both power consumption and exposure of human beings will become important parameters. Here, a capacity based deployment tool is proposed whereby the developed network is optimized towards power consumption, power consumption while satisfying a certain exposure limit, or exposure accounting for coverage and capacity requirements. Applying this tool on a realistic suburban area in Ghent, Belgium for LTE-Advanced shows that power consumption and exposure optimizations contradict and that a compromise between both is required.