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 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 - MIMO iDFT/DFT Offloading and O-RAN DoS Attack - running side-by-side on a 32-core host, we showcase VOTA capabilities: dedicated-like results while allowing 2.67× more sharing opportunities.