Sionna: An Open-Source Library for Research on Communication Systems

Sionna™ is an open-source Python-based library for research on communication systems.

The official documentation can be found here.

It is composed of the following packages:

• Sionna RT - A lightning-fast stand-alone ray tracer for radio propagation modeling

• Sionna PHY - A link-level simulator for wireless and optical communication systems

• Sionna SYS - A system-level simulator based on physical-layer abstraction

Installation

Sionna PHY and Sionna SYS require Python 3.8-3.12 and TensorFlow 2.14-2.19. We recommend Ubuntu 24.04. Earlier versions of TensorFlow may still work but are not recommended. We refer to the TensorFlow GPU support tutorial for GPU support and the required driver setup.

Sionna RT has the same requirements as Mitsuba 3 and we refer to its installation guide for further information. To run Sionna RT on CPU, LLVM is required by Dr.Jit. Please check the installation instructions for the LLVM backend. The source code of Sionna RT is located in a separate GitHub repository.

If you want to run the tutorial notebooks on your machine, you also need JupyterLab. You can alternatively test them on Google Colab. Although not necessary, we recommend running Sionna in a Docker container and/or Python virtual enviroment.

Installation via pip

The recommended way to install Sionna is via pip:

pip install sionna

If you want to install only Sionna RT, run:

pip install sionna-rt

You can install Sionna without the RT package via

pip install sionna-no-rt

Installation from source

1. Clone the repository with all submodules:

   git clone --recursive https://github.com/NVlabs/sionna
   

   If you have already cloned the repository but forgot to set the --recursive flag, you can correct this via:

   git submodule update --init --recursive --remote
   

2. Install Sionna (including Sionna RT) by running the following command from within the repository's root folder:

   pip install ext/sionna-rt/ .
   pip install .
   

Testing

First, you need to install the test requirements by executing the following command from the repository's root directory:

pip install '.[test]'

The unit tests can then be executed by running pytest from within the test folder.

Building the Documentation

Install the requirements for building the documentation by running the following command from the repository's root directory:

pip install '.[doc]'

You might need to install pandoc manually.

You can then build the documentation by executing make html from within the doc folder.

The documentation can then be served by any web server, e.g.,

python -m http.server --dir build/html

For Developers

Development requirements can be installed by executing from the repository's root directory:

pip install '.[dev]'

Linting of the code can be achieved by running pylint src/ from the repository's root directory.

License and Citation

Sionna is Apache-2.0 licensed, as found in the LICENSE file.

If you use this software, please cite it as:

@software{sionna,
 title = {Sionna},
 author = {Hoydis, Jakob and Cammerer, Sebastian and {Ait Aoudia}, Fayçal and Nimier-David, Merlin and Maggi, Lorenzo and Marcus, Guillermo and Vem, Avinash and Keller, Alexander},
 note = {https://nvlabs.github.io/sionna/},
 year = {2022},
 version = {1.0.1}
}