4G RAN Infrastructure Sharing by 5G Virtualized Mobile Network Operators: A Tutorial

Active radio access network (RAN) infrastructure sharing has emerged as a promising solution for efficient spectrum utilization, capital and operational cost savings, improved MVNO penetration rates and lower broadband retail prices in both emerging and developed markets. This paper presents a tutorial on the testbed implementation of an active RAN sharing architecture, leveraging multi-vendor virtualized 5G and 4G core networks running on commodity hardware and proprietary 4G RAN equipment (eNodeB). Troubleshooting techniques used for different implementation challenges encountered are also presented in this contribution. The performance of the proposed architecture was validated using end-user quality of experience (QoE) as the key performance indicator. The results show no performance degradation when RAN sharing is being utilized.