Understanding the 5G-air-simulator: A tutorial on design criteria, technical components, and reference use cases

The 5G air interface, also known as New Radio, is providing a significant transformation in the mobile network landscape. It introduces flexible and heterogeneous capabilities to harmoniously blend numerous technical components since a variety of advanced services are being developed, each one entailing different requirements. Nonetheless, the effective management of such a broad diversity is a challenging task to accomplish. As is well known, computer simulation always supported the design, the evaluation, and the optimization of emerging communication technologies, while guaranteeing faster and cheaper investigations than real-world prototypes. This approach is even more useful when applied to the investigation of conventional and extended facilities of the New Radio. The 5G-air-simulator provides a significant step forward in this direction: developed as an open-source system-level tool, it models the key elements of the New Radio (including massive Multiple Input Multiple Output, extended multicast and broadcast, predictor antennas, enhanced random access procedure, NB-IoT) and supports the performance analysis of reference 5G scenarios with different mobility, traffic load, and deployment configurations. This tutorial thoroughly describes both the inner simulator workings and its general-purpose features, while guiding the reader through a series of simulation campaigns for typical 5G scenarios, recently investigated in scientific literature and European projects. Moreover, for each use case taken into account, it deeply explains the syntax used to perform the simulations, the steps to extract the main KPIs, and reference results confirming what presented by the research in this area. The whole contribution, indeed, ensures an immediate usage of the developed simulator for both Academia and Industry, while presenting a calibrated instrument for evaluating the design and the integration of new technical components for current and upcoming mobile radio interfaces.