O-RAN Neutral Hosting as a Viable Solution for First Responders Seamless Connectivity

Seamless connectivity is critical for first responders in emergency situations, where communications can be impaired by disrupted infrastructures and network congestion. O-RAN targets unprecedented openness of radio access networks which may be beneficial in critical conditions where the integration among operator networks may compensate scarce availability of resources. In this work we propose an O-RAN-based architectural approach exploiting neutral hosting as a unified access to Radio Access Network (RAN) infrastructures. The proposed approach offers transparent access to first responders and efficiently accommodates resources at RAN and Core level in an area of interest thanks to near-real-time applications (xApps) and non-real-time applications (rApps) hosted by the neutral host.