Tuna: an efficient and practical scheme for wireless access point in 5G networks virtualization

IEEE Recently, Network function virtualization (NFV) has been widely used in 5G innovation. However, with the implementation of NFV, virtualized wireless access point has suffered a significant performance degradation. In this letter, we propose an efficient packet processing scheme (Tuna) to improve the performance of wireless network virtualization. Specifically, we locate management frame into user space for virtualization, and place control and data frame in kernel space to reduce packet processing delay. Moreover, hostapd and network address translation (NAT) are modified to accelerate packet processing. We implemented the prototype of the proposed scheme, and the experimental results demonstrate that Tuna can improve both delay and throughput dramatically.