transmitted), and depacketization time (time to clock all the bits out). For low-priority packets, the queu- ing time dominates (especially in congested NEs); for highest-priority packets, the queuing time is reduced to head-of-line blocking time (the time for the currently transmitted packet to finish). To understand these contributions, consider designing to minimize delay using standard technologies. We'll consider a hypothetical case of an RU directly connected over a 10 km 6 Enabling Technologies fiber link to a DU, which in turn is midhauled over 40 km via 10 hops to a CU, and a server directly connected to the 5GC but 250 km and 10 routers away from the CU. Adding the components we find 200 km of fiber contributing only a single millisecond. On the other hand, the 10 midhaul switches may contribute 20 us each, and the 10 core routers 200 us each, for an additional 2.2 ms. We are thus over 3 ms in the absolute best case. If midhaul or 5GC become congested the numbers will be much greater, and for servers not directly hooked up to the 5GC, the additional routers may add significantly higher latencies. Physics tells us that the only way to minimize the propagation latencies is to reduce the distance traveled. One way to achieve this is to employ virtualized applications closer to the RU (e.g. with MEC, see Section 6.4 for details), where at least the first portion of the process- ing is placed at the cell site or at an aggregation point. Such placement allows for extremely rapid acknowledgements, which can, for example, enable battery-powered IoT devices to promptly return to sleep mode. MEC additionally reduces core data rate requirements, since large quantities of data may be combined or summarized. For non-priority traffic the dominant contribution to residence time in a single NE is queuing time. Traffic shaping (MEF 10.3, RFC 2475) typically adds significant delay in its attempt to avoid exceeding packet loss objectives, which are considered more significant. For TCP-based traffic this "bufferbloat" (CoD