MIMO in network simulators: Design, implementation and evaluation of single-user MIMO in ns-3 5G-LENA

MIMO technology has been studied in textbooks for several decades, and it has been adopted in 4G and 5G systems. Due to the recent evolution in 5G and beyond networks, designed to cover a wide range of use cases with every time more complex applications, it is essential to have network simulation tools (such as ns-3) to evaluate MIMO performance from the network perspective, before real implementation. Up to date, the well-known ns-3 simulator has been missing the inclusion of single-user MIMO (SU-MIMO) models for 5G. In this paper, we detail the implementation models and provide an exhaustive evaluation of SU-MIMO in the 5G-LENA module of ns-3. As per 3GPP 5G, we adopt a hybrid beamforming architecture and a closed-loop MIMO mechanism and follow all 3GPP specifications for MIMO implementation, including channel state information feedback with precoding matrix indicator and rank indicator reports, and codebook-based precoding following Precoding Type-I (used for SU-MIMO). The simulation models are released in open-source and currently support up to 32 antenna ports and 4 streams per user. The simulation results presented in this paper help in testing and verifying the simulated models, for different multi-antenna array and antenna ports configurations.