EMF-Aware Cell Selection in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

The growing concern on the exposure of users to the electromagnetic field (EMF) has recently brought new challenges to the mobile research community. In this letter, we propose a novel cell association framework for heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets), which aims to balance the load amongst heterogeneous cells so as to improve the resource usage and to increase the user satisfaction in terms of both data rate and EMF exposure. We model the cell selection problem as a General Assignment Problem (GAP) and we present two heuristic algorithms, which solve it with limited complexity. Our analysis shows that the proposed solutions lead to notable improvements with respect to legacy association schemes.