VOTA: Parallelizing 6G-RAN Experimentation with Virtualized Over-The-Air Workloads
Chang Liu, T. D. Khoa Le, Rahul Saini, Kishor C. Joshi, George Exarchakos
Published: 2025/8/29
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.