SANDRAN: our modular system-level simulator for 6G RANs is on IEEE Xplore

The paper SANDRAN: A Modular System-Level Simulator for Real-Time Evaluation of 6G Radio Access Networks (Alex Piccioni, Koteswararao Kondepu, Andrea Marotta), presented at the 29th IEEE/ACM DS-RT 2026 in Padova, is now available on IEEE Xplore.

SANDRAN integrates the components that govern radio-access performance (propagation, cell association, inter-cell SINR, modulation and coding adaptation, traffic generation and resource scheduling) as independent, replaceable blocks, and evaluates throughput, latency, BLER and outage as real-time QoS metrics through a snapshot-based Monte Carlo approach. It supports 6G use cases such as Urban Air Mobility, O-RAN architectures and multi-connectivity, and complements high-fidelity event-driven simulators for rapid algorithm development, design-space exploration and lightweight network digital twins.

The simulator is written in MATLAB and released as open source under the MIT license.

• Paper: IEEE Xplore
• Code: github.com/igghins/SANDRAN