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Performance Analysis of User Altitude Influence on The EMF Exposure from Earth Station to Satellite Communications
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Performance Analysis of User Altitude Influence on The EMF Exposure from Earth Station to Satellite Communications

Yujie Qin, Mustafa A. Kishk, Ahmed Elzanaty, Luca Chiaraviglio and Mohamed-Slim Alouini
IEEE networking letters, pp.1-1
17/06/2026

Abstract

altitude Antennas Distance measurement Earth Earth station EMF exposure exposure index feeder link Grounding Joining processes LEO satellite Modeling satellite communication Satellite communications Satellites Simulation Specific absorption rate stochastic geometry
Integrating satellites into current communication networks is expected to bridge the digital divide. However, when Earth stations (or ground stations) communicate with nearby satellites, they generate significant power, leading to potential electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure for nearby humans: humans may experience either mainlobe or sidelobe exposure from the feeder link of Earth stations, which depends on user altitudes and the satellite positions. To analyze the EMF exposure from feeder link of Earth stations to satellites, we utilize tools from stochastic geometry to model the locations of the Earth stations and satellites, and capture the impact of user altitude on the EMF exposure. Initially, we analyze the angle between the user and the mainlobe from the antenna array of Earth stations, which corresponds to the angle between satellites and users. Subsequently, we compute the mean exposure index (EI), a commonly used performance metric in EMF exposure analysis, as well as the percentiles of the EI. Our numerical results demonstrate that increasing user altitude generally reduces the mean EI due to weaker alignment with Earth-station mainlobes, while percentile analysis reveals that high-exposure events may still occur under dense satellite deployments.

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