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

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 $\mathbf{\text{VOTA}}$, 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 – $\mathit{\text{MIMO}}\mathit{\text{iDFT/DFT}}\mathit{\text{Offloading}}$ and $\mathit{\text{O-RAN}}\mathit{\text{DoS}}\mathit{\text{Attack}}$ – running side-by-side on a 32-core host, we showcase VOTA capabilities: $\mathbf{\text{dedicated-like}}$ results while allowing $\mathbf{\text{2.67}}\times$ more sharing opportunities.