ns-3 and 5G-LENA Extensions to Support Dual-Polarized MIMO

TL;DR

This paper introduces and evaluates new ns-3 and 5G-LENA extensions supporting dual-polarized MIMO with realistic modeling of spatial multiplexing, enabling more accurate simulation of high-frequency cellular systems.

Contribution

The paper presents novel ns-3 and nr module models for dual-polarized MIMO that avoid abstraction, allowing realistic simulation of propagation, correlation, and interference effects.

Findings

The models enable realistic simulation of dual-polarized MIMO in ns-3.

An adaptive rank adaptation scheme outperforms fixed schemes.

Models are openly available for the research community.

Abstract

MIMO spatial multiplexing is an essential feature to increase the communication data rates in current and future cellular systems. Currently, the ns-3 lte module leverages an abstraction model for 2x2 MIMO with spatial multiplexing of two streams; while mmwave and nr modules were lacking the spatial multiplexing option until this work, since the ns-3 models were not supporting the usage of multiple antennas for spatial multiplexing and an abstraction model such as the one used in the lte module is not suitable for the mmWave frequencies. In this paper, we propose, implement and evaluate models for ns-3 and the nr module to enable Dual-Polarized MIMO (DP-MIMO). The proposed extension for the ns-3 supports multiple antennas for DP-MIMO with spatial multiplexing of two streams and can be used by any ns-3 module that is compatible with the ns-3 antenna array-based models, such as nr and mmwave modules. We leverage this ns-3 extension to model DP-MIMO by exploiting dual-polarized antennas and their orthogonality under line-of-sight conditions, as it happens at high-frequency bands, to send the two data streams. The proposed model does not rely on abstraction, as the MIMO model in the ns-3 lte module, and can thus model more realistically the propagation differences of the two streams, correlation, inter-stream interference, and allows design and evaluation of the rank adaptation algorithms. Additionally, we propose and evaluate an adaptive rank adaptation scheme and compare it with a fixed scheme. The developed DP-MIMO spatial multiplexing models for the ns-3 simulator and the nr module are openly available.