s that are cheaper and easier to access and operate. With less equipment needed to be located at cell sites, lease costs are reduced, while operators also benefit from faster upgrades and more flexible deployments. Another key cost factor in a virtualized RAN deployment is the fronthaul capacity and latency requirements. Enabling multiple functional splits (described in detail in Chapter 4) gives the operator choices to virtualize portions of the RAN based on the transport network bandwidth and latency availability. In addition, compression schemes have been identified in open RAN standards (see Section 4.5 for details), which allow scaling the bandwidth with traffic. This enables operators to scale capacity dynamically where it is needed in the net- work during peak busy times or scale down during quiet times. This capability also enables operators to move capacity to where users are as they move around the network, thereby improving the network performance and reducing costs. Thus, RAN virtualization signifi- cantly reduces TCO compared with traditional implementations and brings the flexibility, scalability, and cost savings of network virtualization to the mobile network edge. Even though RAN virtualization provides significant benefits, there is also a cost associ- ated with it. General purpose hardware used in virtualized platforms often tends to consume more power, compared with a customized hardware specifically designed for the task. It is expected, though, that silicon process advancements and processor optimizations will be 1 BBUs may contain, for example, the functionality of gNB-CU and parts of the functionality of gNB-DU. 6 Enabling Technologies able to mitigate such disadvantages and eventually bring the gap in power consumption to acceptable levels. 6.2.3 Architecture Evolution Toward Virtualization Traditionally, all networking components were deployed as standalone network nodes with dedicated hardware. Many of these had proprietary hardware components with limited interoperability. The hardware