NeutRAN: An Open RAN Neutral Host Architecture for Zero-Touch RAN and Spectrum Sharing

TL;DR

NeutRAN is a zero-touch, virtualized RAN framework that enables rapid deployment and spectrum sharing among multiple tenants, significantly improving network throughput and reducing setup time.

Contribution

This paper introduces NeutRAN, a novel automated and virtualized neutral host architecture supporting zero-touch onboarding and spectrum sharing in RANs.

Findings

NeutRAN deploys in around 10 seconds.

It increases network throughput by up to 2.18x.

It achieves significant throughput gains with limited spectrum.

Abstract

Obtaining access to exclusive spectrum, cell sites, Radio Access Network (RAN) equipment, and edge infrastructure imposes major capital expenses to mobile network operators. A neutral host infrastructure, by which a third-party company provides RAN services to mobile operators through network virtualization and slicing techniques, is seen as a promising solution to decrease these costs. Currently, however, neutral host providers lack automated and virtualized pipelines for onboarding new tenants and to provide elastic and on-demand allocation of resources matching operators' requirements. To address this gap, this paper presents NeutRAN, a zero-touch framework based on the O-RAN architecture to support applications on neutral hosts and automatic operator onboarding. NeutRAN builds upon two key components: (i) an optimization engine to guarantee coverage and to meet quality of service requirements while accounting for the limited amount of shared spectrum and RAN nodes, and (ii) a fully virtualized and automated infrastructure that converts the output of the optimization engine into deployable micro-services to be executed at RAN nodes and cell sites. NeutRAN was prototyped on an OpenShift cluster and on a programmable testbed with 4 base stations and 10 users from 3 different tenants. We evaluate its benefits, comparing it to a traditional license-based RAN where each tenant has dedicated physical and spectrum resources. We show that NeutRAN can deploy a fully operational neutral host-based cellular network in around 10 seconds. Experimental results show that it increases the cumulative network throughput by 2.18x and the per-user average throughput by 1.73x in networks with shared spectrum blocks of 30 MHz. NeutRAN provides a 1.77x cumulative throughput gain even when it can only operate on a shared spectrum block of 10 MHz (one third of the spectrum used in license-based RANs).