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Virtual WiFi: bring virtualization from wired to wireless

Published: 09 March 2011 Publication History

Abstract

As virtualization trend is moving towards "client virtualization", wireless virtualization remains to be one of the technology gaps that haven't been addressed satisfactorily. Today's approaches are mainly developed for wired network, and are not suitable for virtualizing wireless network interface due to the fundamental differences between wireless and wired LAN devices that we will elaborate in this paper. We propose a wireless LAN virtualization approach named virtual WiFi that addresses the technology gap. With our proposed solution, the full wireless LAN functionalities are supported inside virtual machines; each virtual machine can establish its own connection with self-supplied credentials; and multiple separate wireless LAN connections are supported through one physical wireless LAN network interface. We designed and implemented a prototype for our proposed virtual WiFi approach, and conducted detailed performance study. Our results show that with conventional virtualization overhead mitigation mechanisms, our proposed approach can support fully functional wireless functions inside VM, and achieve close to native performance of Wireless LAN with moderately increased CPU utilization.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    VEE '11: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
    March 2011
    250 pages
    ISBN:9781450306874
    DOI:10.1145/1952682
    • cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
      ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 46, Issue 7
      VEE '11
      July 2011
      231 pages
      ISSN:0362-1340
      EISSN:1558-1160
      DOI:10.1145/2007477
      Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 09 March 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. hypervisor
    2. performance
    3. virtualization
    4. wifi
    5. wireless

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    • (2024)Reproducible Wireless Experiments in a Containerized Environment with Hardware Access2024 IEEE 49th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN)10.1109/LCN60385.2024.10639643(1-7)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
    • (2024)RAN Virtualization: How Hard Is It to Fully Achieve?IEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.337574912(38030-38047)Online publication date: 2024
    • (2022) Efficient Orchestration of Virtualization Resource in RAN Based on Chemical Reaction Optimization and Q -Learning IEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2021.30983319:5(3383-3396)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2022
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