ns-3 and 5G-LENA Extensions to Support Dual-Polarized MIMO

MIMO spatial multiplexing is an essential feature to increase the communication data rates in current and future cellular systems. Currently, the ns-3 lte module leverages an abstraction model for 2x2 MIMO with spatial multiplexing of two streams; while mmwave and nr modules were lacking the spatial multiplexing option until this work since the ns-3 models were not supporting the usage of multiple antennas for spatial multiplexing. In this paper, we propose, implement, and evaluate models for ns-3 and the nr module to enable Dual-Polarized MIMO (DP-MIMO). The proposed extension for the ns-3 supports multiple antennas for DP-MIMO with spatial multiplexing of two streams and can be used by any ns-3 module that is compatible with the ns-3 antenna array-based models, such as nr and mmwave modules. We leverage this ns-3 extension to model DP-MIMO by exploiting dual-polarized antennas and their orthogonality under line-of-sight conditions, as it happens at high-frequency bands, to send the two data streams. The proposed model does not rely on abstraction, as the MIMO model in the ns-3 lte module, and can thus model more realistically the propagation differences of the two streams, correlation, inter-stream interference, and allows the design and evaluation of the rank adaptation algorithms. Additionally, we propose and evaluate an adaptive rank adaptation scheme and compare it with a fixed scheme. The developed DP-MIMO spatial multiplexing models for the ns-3 simulator and the nr module are openly available.