Wout Joseph

Wout Joseph (1977) received the M. Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Ghent University (Belgium), in 2000. His research work dealt with measuring and modelling of electromagnetic fields around base stations for mobile communications related to the health effects of the exposure to electromagnetic radiation. This work led to a Ph. D. degree in March 2005. Until 2009, he was postdoctoral researcher for iMinds-UGent. From 2007 to 2013, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow of the FWO-V (Research Foundation – Flanders). Since October 2009, he is professor in the domain of Experimental Characterization of wireless communication systems. He is IMEC PI since 2017. He is elected council board lid of EBEA (European Bioelectromagnetics Association) in 2015, re-elected in 2019. His professional interests are electromagnetic field exposure assessment, in-body electromagnetic field modelling, electromagnetic medical applications, propagation for wireless communication systems, IoT, antennas and calibration. His research was ranked first in number of dosimetric peer-reviewed studies for the radiofrequency range (Bodewein et al. BioEM 2016 www.emf-portal.org)

Update: “Stochastic-raytracing simulations of 5G base station and 5G in-situ measurements”

Abstract: As the roll-out of the fifth generation (5G) of mobile telecommunications is well underway, methods to assess the human exposure to 5G New Radio (NR) base station radios are needed. The 5G mobile networks being rolled-out consist of 5G new radio technology, Massive MIMO (MaMIMO) where the base stations will in most cases use beamforming, small cells, and mm-wave technology. MaMIMO as 5G technology enables benefits such as excellent spectral efficiency and superior energy efficiency. The main concept is to use large base station antenna arrays to simultaneously serve multiple user equipment.

A stochastic-raytracer as numerical approach for MaMIMO human exposure assessment will be presented and applied on a realistic 5G MaMIMO base station site. This approach can be directly applied to the estimation of downlink human exposure assessment in such 5G networks.

The influence of number of antenna elements, usage duration, number of users, different precoding methods on the resulting field levels and distribution will be explained. In a second part of the presentation, experimental field levels assessed in a 5G network will be discussed. The fields are determined in-situ using a novel assessment method for downlink exposure to fifth generation NR base stations. Realistic exposure levels with and without active user equipment have been determined by measurements and simulations.