English

VOTA: Parallelizing 6G-RAN Experimentation with Virtualized Over-The-Air Workloads

Networking and Internet Architecture 2025-09-03 v1

Abstract

Testbed sharing, a practice in which different researchers concurrently develop independent use cases on top of the same testbed, is ubiquitous in wireless experimental research. Its key drawback is experimental inconvenience: one must delay experiments or tolerate compute and RF interference that harms experimental fidelity. In this paper, we propose \textbf{VOTA}, an open-source, software-only testbed scaling method that leverages real-time virtualization and frequency tuning to maximize parallel experiments while controlling interference. In a demonstration of two interference-sensitive 6G use cases -- \textit{MIMO iDFT/DFT Offloading} and \textit{O-RAN DoS Attack} -- running side-by-side on a 32-core host, we showcase VOTA capabilities: \textbf{dedicated-like} results while allowing \textbf{2.67×\times} more sharing opportunities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.00130,
  title  = {VOTA: Parallelizing 6G-RAN Experimentation with Virtualized Over-The-Air Workloads},
  author = {Chang Liu and T. D. Khoa Le and Rahul Saini and Kishor C. Joshi and George Exarchakos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.00130},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:12:50.913Z