Reproducibility is fundamental to scientific research. If you develop a new algorithm and use simulations/experiments to claim its superiority over prior algorithms, your claims are only credible if other researchers can reproduce and confirm them.
The first step towards reproducibility is to describe the simulation procedure in such detail that another researcher can repeat the simulation, but a major effort is typically needed to reimplement everything. The second step is to make the simulation code publicly available, so that any scientist can review it and easily reproduce the results. While the first step is mandatory for publishing a scientific study, there is a movement towards open science that would make also the second step a common practice.
I understand that some researchers are skeptical towards sharing their simulation code, in fear of losing their competitive advantage towards other research groups. My personal principle is to not share any code until the research study is finished and the results have been accepted for publication in a full-length journal. After that, I think that the society benefits the most if other researcher can focus on improving my and others’ research, instead of spending excessive amount of time on reimplementing known algorithms. I also believe that the primary competitive advantage in research is the know-how and technical insights, while the simulation code is of secondary importance.
On my GitHub page, I have published Matlab code packages that reproduces the simulation results in one book, one book chapter, and more than 15 peer-reviewed articles. Most of these publications are related to MIMO or Massive MIMO. I see many benefits from doing this:
1) It increases the credibility of my research group’s work;
2) I write better code when I know that other people will read it;
3) Other researchers can dedicate their time into developing new improved algorithms and compare them with my baseline implementations;
4) Young scientists may learn how to implement a basic simulation environment by reading the code.
I hope that other Massive MIMO researchers will also make their simulation code publicly available. Maybe you have already done that? In that case, please feel free to write a comment to this post with a link to your code.
I regularly get the question “are there any Massive MIMO books?”. So far my answer has always been “no”, but now I can finally give a positive answer.