Will the Proliferation of 5G Base Stations Increase the Radio-Frequency Pollution?

A common concern among the population is that installing new 5G Base Stations (BSs) over a given portion of territory results into an uncontrollable increase of Radio-Frequency (RF) pollution. To face this dispute, we consider RF pollution in terms of power received from a set of 5G BSs. Specifically, we develop a model to compute the RF pollution at selected distances between the user and the 5G BS locations, e.g., at an average distance or at a fixed one. We then obtain closed-form expressions to quantify the RF pollution increase/decrease when comparing a pair of 5G deployments. Our results show that a dense 5G deployment is in general beneficial to the users living in proximity to the 5G BSs, with an abrupt decrease of RF pollution (up to three orders of magnitude) compared to a sparse deployment. However, we also show that, when a minimum sensitivity threshold is increased, the RF pollution from 5G BSs may be (lightly) increased.