MAC-Arena: A Unified and Realistic Radio Resource Scheduling Simulator

Resource scheduling is critical to the transmission performance of RAN, yet existing studies typically adopt self-defined simulation environments and overlook the practical scheduling process. To this end, we present MAC-Arena---a RAN resource scheduling simulator tailored for open and reproducible MAC-layer research. MAC-Arena models realistic delays that affect performance in the scheduling process, supports state-of-the-art physical-layer techniques and channel models, and accommodates both 5G and a potential 6G fully-decoupled RAN architecture that isolates uplink and downlink operations. The simulator abstracts physical-layer computation for efficiency, and is developed to be AI-friendly for evaluating AI-based algorithms.