A Full-Stack Open-Source Framework for Antenna and Beamforming Evaluation in mmWave 5G NR

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive open-source simulation framework for 5G mmWave networks, integrating detailed models for antennas, beamforming, and channel behavior to evaluate system performance.

Contribution

It presents a novel full-stack simulation framework that combines ray-tracing, antenna, and beamforming models for 5G mmWave systems, enabling detailed performance analysis.

Findings

Different antenna and beamforming configurations impact link-level performance.

The framework allows end-to-end evaluation of 5G mmWave network scenarios.

Simulation results highlight the importance of accurate modeling for system optimization.

Abstract

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication represents one of the main innovations of the next generation of wireless technologies, allowing users to reach unprecedented data rates. To overcome the high path loss at mmWave frequencies, these systems make use of directional antennas able to focus the transmit power into narrow beams using BeamForming (BF) techniques, thus making the communication directional. This new paradigm opens up a set of challenges for the design of efficient wireless systems, in which antenna and BF components play an important role also at the higher layer of the protocol stack. For this reason, accurate modeling of these components in a full-stack simulation is of primary importance to understand the overall system behavior. This paper proposes a novel framework for the end-to-end simulation of 5G mmWave cellular networks, including a ray-tracing based channel model and accurate models for antenna arrays and BF schemes. We showcase this framework by evaluating the performance of different antenna and BF configurations considering both link-level and end-to-end metrics and present the obtained results.