Sionna 2.1: 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 3.11+ and PyTorch 2.9+. We recommend Ubuntu 24.04. Earlier versions of PyTorch may still work but are not recommended. We refer to the PyTorch get-started guide for GPU (CUDA) 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 environment.

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

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
```
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.

To serve the documentation locally:

make serve

This serves the documentation at http://localhost:8000/sionna/ with the same URL structure as the production website. You can specify a different port with make serve PORT=9000.

For local development without the /sionna/ prefix, build and serve with:

BASE_PATH= make html
BASE_PATH= make serve

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 = {2.1.0}
}

communication systems ray tracing physical layer link-level simulation system-level simulation 5G 6G radio propagation channel model wireless communication optical communication wireless networks deep learning differentiable simulation differentiable ray tracing gradient-based optimization automatic differentiation neural networks machine learning

Intended Audience
- Science/Research
- Telecommunications Industry
Operating System
- OS Independent
Programming Language
- Python :: 3

Release files for sionna 2.1.0

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for sionna 2.1.0
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
sionna-2.1.0-py3-none-any.whl 673.2 kB Sep 9, 2026	Python 3	none	any	Details

Release files / sionna-2.1.0-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	sionna-2.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
Size	673.2 kB
Tags	Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`0288ee16a7a39da49dcca8aa31ba2c2bd8831058cd083f9b49cba4835d604ed6`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`c1ca5508e8400367d7e9aca93d0bd449ee35f8db09d6142b7b537959e580cdf0`
Upload date	Sep 9, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.14.7`