According to a very popular belief - very widespread among non-scientific communities - the exploitation of narrow beams, a.k.a. "pencil beamforming", will dramatically increase the exposure levels radiated by 5G Base Stations. To face such concern with a scientific approach, in this work we derive a simple yet meaningful model to evaluate the ElectroMagnetic Field (EMF) exposure from a set of 5G Base Stations employing pencil beamforming. Results, obtained by coding our model in a publicly released open-source simulator, dispel the myth: pencil beamforming allows to radically reduce the exposure w.r.t. the case in which no beamforming is exploited. In addition, we show that a tuning of the pencil beams based on the uncertainty level for localizing the User Equipment plays a key role in limiting the number of overlapping beams, and therefore the exposure levels experienced over the territory.

中文翻译：

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笔形波束成形增加了人体对电磁场的暴露：对还是错？

根据一个非常普遍的信念-在非科学社区中非常普遍-利用窄波束（也称为“铅笔波束成形”）将极大地提高5G基站辐射的暴露水平。为了用科学的方法面对这种担忧，在这项工作中，我们得出了一个简单而有意义的模型，用于评估采用铅笔波束成形的一组5G基站的电磁场（EMF）暴露。通过在公开发布的开源模拟器中对我们的模型进行编码而获得的结果消除了神话：笔形波束成形可以从根本上减少不使用波束成形的情况下的曝光量。此外，我们表明，根据不确定性级别对笔形光束进行调整以定位用户设备在限制重叠光束的数量方面起着关键作用，