 with the most likely candidates for acceleration being the ciphering in the PDCP layer and the channel coding, also called forward error correction coding (FEC) in the PHY. Finally, the SoC will include I/O capability with Ethernet for backhaul and a different bus protocol for the fronthaul. It should be noted that this is only a high-level description of the key components - a SoC may contain additional components and I/O interfaces. A virtualized architecture consists of a software layer for the gNB RRC/PDCP/RLC/MAC and PHY functionalities, a set of hardware resources including GPP, hardware accelerators and I/O, and a hypervisor to manage the interface between software and hardware. Vir- tualization is being adopted in 5G networks to improve manageability and automation of the network, and for network deployments with some centralization, to reduce hardware requirements by pooling multiple cells onto the same hardware. A virtualized small cell typically doesn't include DSPs, with these PHY functions instead using GPP compute. However, the rest of the hardware components, such as GPP, hardware accelerators, and I/O interfaces are similar to a SoC. What is different between the hard- ware components is the processing capabilities of each component. Virtualized small cells are most suitable where at least some functions are centralized SO each platform is running several small cells. This means the choice of hardware components focuses on flexibility and scalability. The pros and cons of SoC and virtualized platform architectures are shown in Table 4.6.1 for each disaggregation option. When considering the pros and cons it is assumed that the CU is managing multiple cells and the DU hosts a single small cell. 4 NG-RAN Architecture Table 4.6.1 Pros and cons of disaggregation points. Disaggregation System on a chip (SoC) small cell Virtualized small cell - Can be efficiently designed to - Virtualization can help if operate as one cell small cell also includes MEC - Can lack flexibility if - Difficult to compete wi