New Radio Physical Layer Abstraction for System-Level Simulations of 5G Networks

A physical layer (PHY) abstraction model estimates the PHY performance in system-level simulators to speed up the simulations. This paper presents a PHY abstraction model for 5G New Radio (NR) and its integration into an open-source ns-3 based NR system-level simulator. The model capitalizes on the exponential effective signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) mapping (EESM) and considers the latest NR specification. To generate it, we used an NR-compliant link-level simulator to calibrate the EESM method as well as to obtain SINR-block error rate (BLER) lookup tables for various NR configurations. We also illustrate the usability of the developed model through end-to-end simulations in ns-3, under different NR settings of modulation and coding schemes, hybrid automatic repeat request combining methods, and link adaptation approaches.