Design of system-level simulation platform for 5G networks

The Fifth Generation (5G) of mobile communications systems have been proposed and researched globally, and are expected to be launched in 2020. Aside from diverse exciting air-interface innovations for 5G systems, the networking design plays the critically important role to support the massive mobile traffics. It is widely recognized that the core features of 5G networking lie in the heterogeneous accesses, which are not confined to coexistence of small and macro cells, but generalized to access over multiple air-interfaces with utterly different networking fashions, such as LTE-A and WLAN. The heterogeneous feature not only complicates the network design, but also imposes significant challenges in system-level simulations and evaluations. Lack of innovation in simulation techniques will no doubt slow down the evolving and standardization process of 5G systems. To tackle these problems, we in this paper present a novel design of system-level 5G simulation platform. The unique features of our design include two-fold. 1) Simultaneous simulation of different types of networks are supported. In particular, cellular networks run in a well time-aligned fashion while WiFi operates entirely based on asynchronous random access mechanism. 2) Our platform offers the simulation of concurrent transmissions over multiple radio-access technologies for each single user, supporting either single or multiple services. We elaborate on the core ideas of our design embedding the aforementioned features as well as the details for building the entire platform. We also discuss the future innovative efforts and directions in simulation techniques for 5G networks.