Measurement-calibrated urban RF modeling for AI-native RAN control, ISAC evaluation, and wireless digital twins

Sionna ray tracing over a shipyard-scale wireless scene Shipyard wireless digital twin scene
The figures show how reconfigurable intelligent surfaces can help redirect wireless signals around obstacles and improve network coverage in complex smart-port environments.

This project develops Sionna-enabled large-scale ray tracing workflows for AI-RAN and integrated sensing and communication research. The work focuses on measurement-calibrated urban RF modeling, wireless digital twins, and simulation pipelines that connect realistic propagation behavior with AI-native RAN control and ISAC evaluation. Instead of treating the simulator as a standalone channel generator, the project uses ray tracing as a bridge between physical layout, semantic context, and AI-driven wireless decision making.

Digital Twin Workflow

The workflow combines scene-level geometry, semantic environment information, and Sionna-based ray tracing outputs. This makes it possible to connect physical layouts and object classes with channel behavior, sensing coverage, and RAN decision-making policies. A digital twin can be used to generate repeatable experiments for beam selection, blockage-aware control, sensing viewpoint selection, and AI-RAN policy evaluation before moving to field measurements.

Semantic map for AI-RAN and ISAC environment modeling
Semantic representation for context-aware AI-RAN and ISAC models.

The semantic representation adds another layer to the propagation model. By identifying object classes and spatial context, the system can reason about why a link or sensing path changes, not only that it changes. This is useful for training AI models that need to generalize across environments and for building explainable control loops in AI-RAN and ISAC systems.

Research Focus

Resources

Project status: Planning-stage research supported by NVIDIA funding.

Sionna

UH News: NVIDIA grant boosts UH Mānoa research in AI-powered wireless networks. UH News