Simulation and Analysis of Mobile Access (SAMA): Cellular Radio Access Network Simulator and Performance Evaluator Applied to 5G

The different use-case scenarios for mobile networks make radio access network (RAN) assessment using only coverage (radio link) prediction inadequate since channel capacity and latency play vital roles in some scenarios. To correctly evaluate the RAN performance, the flexible assignment of the spatial (beamforming) and time-frequency resources of the physical layer frame must be accounted for. This paper presents a RAN simulator for 5G mobile networks that can evaluate different performance indicators of the base stations (BS) arrangement supporting a user equipment (UE) distribution in the region where the mobile network operates. The BS may have multiple sectors and antenna arrays for beamforming in the simulator. The simulator supports both uplink and downlink. Each simulation round considers a physical layer frame when the UEs' positions are assumed static for the assignment between BS beams and UEs. The tool also encompasses some standard schedulers for the radio resources. Besides the UEs–BSs assignment and scheduling, which depend on the BS arrangement and the distribution of UEs and the scheduler, the simulator returns performance indicators as the capacity, throughput, and latency for each UE. The performance accounts for the interference in the radio environment. Consequently, the presented simulation tool helps with system design and evaluation. The many resources encompassed in the simulator can be configured for many different scenarios. We exemplify the simulator usage by comparing the RAN's performance for different network usages under various network configurations and resource schedulers.