May 09 2022 5G-LENA v2.0 and v2.1 are available

5G-LENA v2.0 and v2.1

We are pleased to announce that in 21th April 2022 and 6th May 2022 we released to the public the releases 2.0 and 2.1 of 5G-LENA NR module, respectively.

Release v2.0 comes with a key new feature: Dual-Polarized MIMO (DP-MIMO). The current NR DP-MIMO model exploits dual-polarized antennas and their orthogonality to send the two data streams, by exploiting polarization diversity. The model does not rely on abstraction, as is it case with LTE MIMO, and thus can more properly model the propagation differences between the two streams and account for rank adaptation. So, one of the important new features that enters with this release along the NR DP-MIMO is the rank adaptation. The major modifications to support the DP-MIMO feature are inside the PHY and MAC layers of the NR module. The model currently supports MIMO with 2 streams for the downlink, however, in the future, the MIMO model will be extended to support more streams and the operation in the uplink. There is a new example called cttc-nr-mimo-demo that can be used to learn how to configure and use DP-MIMO in the NR module. You can also read about the implementation and design of this new feature in the NR module’s documentation. All API changes are explained in detail in CHANGES.md file.

Release v2.1 has many improvements, such as in the NR tracing (PHY, MAC, RLC, and PDCP are all extended and improved), hexagonal scenario helper (the 4th and the 5th ring are supported now to simulate wrap around scenarios, also there is a new function to create a scenario with mobile UEs and with a new option to configure the percentage of users with the random height). Also, the REM helper now shows the progress at std::cout, and the estimated time left. Finally, some bugs are fixed, mainly affecting the lena-lte-comparison example. All new features, changes, and bug fixes are detailed in release notes and CHANGES.md file.

Updating the software is easy as doing a git pull command, for both ns-3-dev and nr module. For ns-3-dev, make sure you go to the ns-3.36 branch, and for nr on 5g-lena-v2.1.y branch. If you still do not have access to the software, please follow the instructions.

For any problem related to the installation, please open an issue ticket on the NR gitlab repository. For any comment, doubt, and discussion, remember that we have a google group for the 5G-LENA users: https://groups.google.com/g/5g-lena-users.

Without any doubt, we would be excited to hear from you for a possible collaboration to improve 5G-LENA!

The 5G-LENA team