Calibration of the 5G-LENA System Level Simulator in 3GPP reference scenarios

TL;DR

This paper calibrates the open-source ns-3 5G-LENA simulator to 3GPP standards for outdoor 5G deployments, ensuring its results are comparable to industrial simulators and real networks.

Contribution

It provides a calibration methodology for the ns-3 5G-LENA simulator based on 3GPP specifications, enhancing its reliability for research and development.

Findings

Simulator results closely match 3GPP reference outcomes

Calibration improves the simulator's accuracy for outdoor deployments

Using REM feature facilitates the calibration process

Abstract

Due to the rapid technology evolution and standardization activity in the mobile communication networks, there is the need for the research community to be able to develop, test and evaluate new and/or already xisting solutions before industrial or real-network implementation. As such, it is essential to have an open-source tool that provides an alternative solution to that of industrial proprietary simulators that are not available for public usage. ns-3 5G-LENA simulator is an end-to-end open-source NR system-level simulator that allows extensive research to be performed. However, it is of great importance to guarantee that the results obtained using the simulator can be comparable to that of industrial simulators and real networks. For this reason, calibrating the simulator based on 3GPP defined specifications is crucial. Based on the above, in this paper we calibrate the ns-3 5G-LENA simulator according to the 3GPP reference results for NR-based outdoor deployments. Moreover, we explore the REM feature provided by the simulator, to ease the calibration process and understand better the radio environment. Results show the resemblance of the simulator performance to that of simulators used as references by 3GPP.