Experimental 5G RAN Slicing deployment with SDRs in a Cloud-Native Testbed

Integrating latency-sensitive Software-Defined Radio (SDR) into cloud-native Fifth Generation (5G) environments for Radio Access Network (RAN) Slicing represents a great challenge, often overlooked by existing testbeds. This paper proposes a reproducible, dual-layered virtualized architecture addressing this gap. We combine hypervisor-level virtualization (Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) with Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) passthrough) for deterministic Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) B210 performance with Operating System (OS)-level container orchestration (Kubernetes and Helm). Customizing OpenAirInterface (OAI) and ORANSlice, our system enables autonomous, policy-driven slice management. Experimental evaluations with commercial 5G User Equipment (UEs) demonstrate the architecture's agility to dynamically reallocate throughput in real-time while maintaining strict computational efficiency and stability without external controllers.