# Validating a 5G-Enabled Neutral Host Framework in City-Wide Deployments
## 7 Conclusions  
Turning a city into a distributed, multitenant and neutral host model-compliant infrastructure demands a comprehensive framework able to support and integrate end-to-end 5G services upon different network technologies. Towards such a goal, this article provides insights into the design and deployment of a three-tier infrastructure and an orchestration platform that enables municipalities and infrastructure providers to create dynamic end-to-end slices composed of both virtualized cloud/edge and network resources and to lease such slices to third party operators/verticals. The developed solution also provides lifecycle management and orchestration of 5G-based edge services, together with the control of the available underlying city-wide infrastructure. Through the execution of use case trials, the benefits of using the neutral host model for deploying, provisioning, and managing vertical services over a virtualized and shared infrastructure was demonstrated. Moreover, obtained results confirm the feasibility of the proposed framework to be deployed as a neutral host solution in city-wide 5G infrastructures. Our future work will further exploit, in the context of the 5 GVictori project, the potential of the 5 GUK testbed to develop media vertical demos and experimentation scenarios over common large-scale field trials. In addition, we will work on the evolution of neutral host platform components, such as the Slice Manager and the RAN Controller, to support 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) and SA technologies together with the deployment of slices with distributed mobile core architectures based on the separation of user and control plane functions. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
**KPI** & **Barcelona** & **Bristol** & **Lucca** \\ \hline User Experienced Data Rate & 44.7 Mbps & 45.5 Mbps & 44.7 Mbps \\ Data Plane Delay & 9.85 ms & 8.5 ms & 8 ms \\ Slice Deployment Time & 21.35 s & 26.53 s & 36.72 s \\ Service Instantiation Time & 84.04 s & 98.63 s & 123.09 s \\ Service Scaling Time & 30.59 s & 38.74 s & 43.68 s \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: KPI measurements. **Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, A.F.-F., C.C.-M., L.O.-A., A.B., H.K., M.S.S., G.C., S.F., R.N. and D.S. ; methodology, A.F.-F., C.C.-M., L.O.-A., A.B., H.K. and M.S.S. ; software, A.F.-F. and L.O.-A. ; validation, A.F.-F., C.C.-M., L.O.-A. and A.B. ; formal analysis, A.F.-F., C.C.-M., L.O.-A., A.B. and H.K. ; investigation, A.F.-F., C.C.-M., L.O.-A., A.B. and H.K. ; resources, M.S.S., G.C., S.F., R.N. and D.S. ; writing--original draft preparation, A.F.-F., C.C.-M., L.O.-A., A.B. and H.K. ; writing--review and editing, A.F.-F., C.C.-M., M.S.S., G.C., S.F., R.N. and D.S. ; visualization, A.F.-F., C.C.-M. and L.O.-A. ; supervision, A.F.-F., C.C.-M., M.S.S. and G.C. ; project administration, A.F.-F., C.C.-M., M.S.S., G.C., S.F., R.N. and D.S. ; funding acquisition M.S.S., G.C., S.F., R.N. and D.S. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. **Funding:** This work was funded by the European Commission through H2020 projects 5 GCity (grant agreement No. 761508) and 5G-VICTORI (grant agreement No. 857201), and from the CERCA Programme, Generalitat de Catalunya. The paper solely reflects the views of the authors. **Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable. **Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable. **Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable. **Acknowledgments:** Authors thank the 5 GCity Consortium for useful insights to this work. **Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.