Sionna: An Open-Source Library for Next-Generation Physical Layer Research

TL;DR

Sionna is an open-source, GPU-accelerated TensorFlow library that facilitates rapid prototyping and benchmarking of advanced communication systems, supporting neural network integration and future extensions for next-generation research.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, tested library enabling efficient simulation and benchmarking of complex communication architectures with neural network support.

Findings

Supports a wide range of state-of-the-art algorithms

Enables end-to-end performance evaluation

Facilitates reproducible research

Abstract

Sionna is a GPU-accelerated open-source library for link-level simulations based on TensorFlow. It enables the rapid prototyping of complex communication system architectures and provides native support for the integration of neural networks. Sionna implements a wide breadth of carefully tested state-of-the-art algorithms that can be used for benchmarking and end-to-end performance evaluation. This allows researchers to focus on their research, making it more impactful and reproducible, while saving time implementing components outside their area of expertise. This white paper provides a brief introduction to Sionna, explains its design principles and features, as well as future extensions, such as integrated ray tracing and custom CUDA kernels. We believe that Sionna is a valuable tool for research on next-generation communication systems, such as 6G, and we welcome contributions from our community.