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Virtual WiFi: bring virtualization from wired to wireless

Published:09 March 2011Publication History
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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 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
      • 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

      Copyright © 2011 ACM

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      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 9 March 2011

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