Cross-Compartment Virtio-Loopback: A Bare-Metal Virtualization Solution for the Edge

With the evolution of 5G technologies and beyond, paradigms like the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) mandate the deployment of services at the edge of the network and close to the users. Contributing to further reducing the latency and improving network performance, these paradigms are essential constituents of a networked infrastructure supporting ultra-reliable and low-latency services, as in the case of the recently emerging intelligent transportation services (ITS). With MEC being coupled with Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), these services are deployed upon the cellular V2X interface as Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) across the various network domains, including the network edge. This paper proposes a virtualization solution suited for VNF deployments of these services at mixed-critical, embedded edge servers. The solution suggests that VNFs interfacing abstracted Virtio devices are hosted at individual and isolated bare-metal Operating Systems (OSes) or compartments, co-executing at the same hardware with different criticality. The current proof-of-concept targets ARMv8 embedded servers and introduces a split client-server Virtio design, extending an existing virtualization framework across bare-metal compartments. Finally, benchmarks on a virtualized embedded board show that the Cross-compartment Virtio-loopback design does not introduce extra overhead compared to the reference implementation.