Assessing Software-Defined Radio Security and Performance in Virtualized Environments for Cloud Radio Access Networks

Fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks must be flexible to meet its variety of emerging use cases. In this context, radio virtualization is promising since it enables multiple hetero-geneous virtual radios to coexist on top of the same hardware. One approach to virtualize radio devices is using virtualization tools, such as virtual machines and containers, to multiplex software radio implementations over generic multipurpose radio hardware. In this paper, we review the security and evaluate the experimental bounds of the communication of software-defined radio (SDR) devices and the virtualization impact on the performance of radio virtualization. Our main goal is to verify the virtual environments' suitability for SDR applications. The results show that container-based radio virtualization per-formance is comparable to SDR applications running on top of native Linux.