Virtualization for Flexibility and Network-Aware on 5G Mobile Devices

The dawn of 5G is rising with emerging wireless and network technologies that promisingly transform various aspects of human lives. The 5G mobile devices are going to tightly engage with the 5G infrastructure for future applications such as virtual reality, AI-enabled applications, etc. However, we argue that the tight engagement with convenience may bring downside that is a user may not correctly control/own her/his device. In particular, the user may not have the flexibility in utilizing networks, as well as, be aware of the network selection. This paper introduces a novel networking stack for 5G mobile devices (namely 5GVir) that leverages virtualization techniques for flexibility and awareness. The 5GVir device can concurrently exploit surrounding wireless networks by using Software Defined Networking (SDN). SDN provides a rich set of flexibility feature that will meet user expectation. Moreover, 5GVir includes wireless virtualization that can relax the dependence on hardware as well as provides a wireless link for the SDN's control channel. Last but not least, the 5GVir device has an additional awareness feature aware that drives each application process to predetermined networks (i.e., applying network namespace). Our prototype shows the potential of realizing 5GVir. Moreover, the initial experiments show that the virtualization in 5GVir has negligible overhead.