Sionna RT: Differentiable Ray Tracing for Radio Propagation Modeling

Abstract--Sionna is a GPU-accelerated open-source library for link-level simulations based on TensorFlow. This unique feature allows for the computation of gradients of the channel impulse response and other related quantities with respect to many system and environment parameters, such as material properties, antenna patterns, array geometries, as well as transmitter and receiver orientations and positions. In this paper, we outline the key components of Sionna RT and showcase example applications such as learning radio materials and optimizing transmitter orientations by gradient descent. In the future, we will include the configuration use-cases of the recently started 3GPP study-item on AI/ML of RIS and multiple other ray-object interactions. RT scene and the channel impulse response (CIR) is required which the widely used stochastic channel models such as [7] Sionna RT is a ray tracing extension for radio propagation cannot provide.