title: Determination of the duty cycle of WLAN for realistic radio frequency electromagnetic field exposure assessment.
abstract: Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are commonly deployed in various environments. The WLAN data packets are not transmitted continuously but often worst-case exposure of WLAN is assessed, assuming 100% activity and leading to huge overestimations. Actual duty cycles of WLAN are thus of importance for time-averaging of exposure when checking compliance with international guidelines on limiting adverse health effects. In this paper, duty cycles of WLAN using Wi-Fi technology are determined for exposure assessment on large scale at 179 locations for different environments and activities (file transfer, video streaming, audio, surfing on the internet, etc.). The median duty cycle equals 1.4% and the 95th percentile is 10.4% (standard deviation SD = 6.4%). Largest duty cycles are observed in urban and industrial environments. For actual applications, the theoretical upper limit for the WLAN duty cycle is 69.8% and 94.7% for maximum and minimum physical data rate, respectively. For lower data rates, higher duty cycles will occur. Although counterintuitive at first sight, poor WLAN connections result in higher possible exposures. File transfer at maximum data rate results in median duty cycles of 47.6% (SD = 16%), while it results in median values of 91.5% (SD = 18%) at minimum data rate. Surfing and audio streaming are less intensively using the wireless medium and therefore have median duty cycles lower than 3.2% (SD = 0.5-7.5%). For a specific example, overestimations up to a factor 8 for electric fields occur, when considering 100% activity compared to realistic duty cycles.
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Technology, Ghent University/IBBT, Gaston Crommenlaan 8 box 201, B-9050 Ghent, Belgium. wout.joseph@intec.UGent.be
authors.forename: Wout
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Joseph
authors.forename: Daan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Pareit
authors.forename: Günter
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Vermeeren
authors.forename: Dries
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Naudts
authors.forename: Leen
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Verloock
authors.forename: Luc
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Martens
authors.forename: Ingrid
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Moerman
mesh_terms: D001822:Body Burden; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004574:Electromagnetic Fields; D004781:Environmental Exposure / Q000032:analysis* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011834:Radiation Monitoring / Q000379:methods*; D011846:Radio Waves; D059015:Wireless Technology / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*