What is NeoRadium?
NeoRadium is a Python library for simulating physical-layer communication pipelines based on the latest 3GPP 5G NR standards. Its object-oriented design abstracts much of the complexity of the underlying communication chain, making it easier to build, run, and analyze end-to-end simulations on standard computing hardware.
In wireless communication research, it is often necessary to evaluate a specific block within a larger pipeline, such as channel estimation, equalization, or CSI feedback. Building a complete 3GPP-compliant simulation environment from scratch for that purpose can be time-consuming and difficult to maintain. NeoRadium addresses this problem by providing a comprehensive end-to-end framework that researchers can readily customize and extend for their own work.
With NeoRadium, users can focus on developing and evaluating new algorithms rather than re-implementing the surrounding infrastructure. No specialized hardware, complex system setup, or GPU resources are required. A standard computer with Python 3.10 or later is sufficient to get started.
NeoRadium also includes a comprehensive Playground with many practical examples. These examples are provided as Jupyter Notebooks and demonstrate both the API and common usage patterns in realistic scenarios.
Key Features
NeoRadium provides a broad set of tools for 5G NR physical-layer research and development. The current release includes the following capabilities, with additional functionality continuing to be added over time.
Channel Coding: Transport block encoding and decoding using Polar and LDPC codes in accordance with TS 38.212.
Carriers and Bandwidth Parts: Timing calculations for cyclic prefix, OFDM symbols, slots, subframes, and frames.
Reference Signal Generation: Support for DM-RS, PT-RS, and CSI-RS generation according to TS 38.211, TS 38.212, and TS 38.214.
Resource Grid Functionality: Resource mapping and OFDM modulation aligned with TS 38.101, TS 38.104, and TS 38.211.
Resource Grid Visualization: Visualization tools for inspecting resource-grid contents.
PDSCH Communication Pipeline: End-to-end PDSCH simulation including modulation and demodulation, mapping and demapping, interleaving and de-interleaving, scrambling and descrambling, transport block size calculation, precoding, channel estimation, and equalization in accordance with TS 38.211 and TS 38.214.
Antenna Array Modeling and Simulation: Based on TR 38.901.
Antenna Field Analysis: Calculation of antenna field power and directivity, with 2D and 3D visualization.
Channel Modeling: Application of CDL and TDL channel models to both time-domain and frequency-domain signals.
DeepMIMO Integration: Import of DeepMIMO ray-tracing scenarios for building user trajectories.
Trajectory-Based Channel Models: Generation of spatially and temporally consistent channel sequences based on user trajectories for end-to-end simulations.
Channel Datasets: Creation of channel-matrix datasets using CDL models or temporally and spatially consistent sequences of channel matrices derived from DeepMIMO trajectories.
HARQ: Support for Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ).
CSI Feedback Simulation (New): Including CSI-RS and CDI report configuration, as well as CRI, RI, PMI, and CQI calculation.
Link adaptation (New): An outer loop link adaptation (OLLA), which can be used as a lightweight link adaptation algorithm for illustrative and simulation-oriented workflows.
CQI Lookup Tables (New): Using Exponential Effective SINR Mapping (EESM), pre-calibrated AWGN SNR-BLER curves, and beta and delta lookup tables for CQI reporting.
Beam Sweeping and Probing (New): Creation of beam-sweeping and beam-probing CSI-RS resources and associated CSI reports.
Changes in Version 0.5.0
Version 0.5.0 introduces major API improvements and internal restructuring in NeoRadium. Although most previously available functionality remains supported, users are strongly encouraged to update existing code to the newer APIs for improved clarity, performance, and long-term compatibility.
Please refer to the Migration Guide for a summary of the required changes.