Neutral Host Technology: The Future of Mobile Network Operators

The neutral host network (NHN) is a new self-contained network envisioned by fifth generation (5G) of cellular networks, which offers wireless connection to its subscribers from a variety of service providers, including both conventional mobile network operators and non-conventional service providers. The NHN infrastructure, which is operated and maintained by a third neutral party, is rented or leased to network operators looking to scale up their network capacities and coverage in a cost-effective way. This paper highlights NHN as an emerging communication technology for private networks and discuss its opportunities and challenges in realizing multi-tenanted space such as factory, hospitals, stadiums, and universities. The paper also investigates the current state of the art in NHN and elaborates on the underlying enabling technologies for the NHN. Lastly, an efficient radio access network (RAN) slicing scheme based on the multi-arm bandit approach has been proposed to allocate radio resources to various slices, which maximizes resource utilization while guaranteeing the availability of resources to meet the capacity needs of each multi-tenanted operator. The simulation results show that the proposed Thompson's sampling (TS)-based approach performs best in finding the optimal RAN slice for all the operators.