Virtual Open Systems Scientific Publications

Introduction

The reinforcement of vehicular networks with intelligent transportation systems (ITS) has opened the way towards improving traffic management, enhancing road safety and minimizing the impact of vehicles on the environment. In these regards, the role of modern interfaces that connect vehicles to everything (V2X) is indispensable, as they enable real-time communication and data exchange between vehicles and the broader infrastructure.

In the context of the cellular V2X interface, recent mobile network trends such as the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) place significant emphasis on the edge domain, advocating for the deployment of transportation services at edge servers, in close-proximity to vehicles. Thanks to these trends, the computational capacities of powerful edge devices can be now more than ever exploited to the greatest extent while aiding to achieve the real-time, low-latency requirements of the ITS services. At the same time, the network services are deployed in the infrastructure and across all network domains as chains of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs). Being decoupled from proprietary hardware, these virtualized functions have facilitated a cloud-to-edge continuum in terms of deployment.

In this regard, the question arises of whether uniformly applying a state-of-the-art virtualization solution across the network, though beneficial for consistency, truly optimizes performance. In light of this, we introduce the Cross-compartment Virtio-loopback solution which aims to re-shape the virtualization environment at the edge, making it particularly suitable for reliable and low-latency services deployment, while maintaining the cloud-to-edge uniformity at a high degree.

Specifically, the Cross-compartment Virtio-loopback is a lightweight, bare-metal virtualization solution, aimed for mixed-critical embedded architectures, such as the ARMv8 and the RISCv. The inherent capability of these architectures to accommodate multiple critical levels, led to the concept of compartments, which are Operating Systems with different critical levels, able to co-execute isolated in the same embedded hardware. At its core, the Cross-compartment Virtio-loopback aims to reinforce the edge devices with the ability to host the virtualized functions at individual compartments, deployed in a bare-metal fashion on the physical hardware. Proposed as an alternative approach to employing virtualization at the network edge, the solution seems promising due to ensuring hardware-enforced isolation and bare-metal execution latency for the deployed compartments.