it is important to look for innovations such as C-RAN for cost efficiencies. The TCO of BTS includes the equipment and the site, power supply, battery backup, cooling, and security costs. These are the capital costs or one-time investments. In addition, there are operating costs, including service and maintenance activities. Understanding MEC C-RAN However, BBU pooling creates economies of scale here. The cost of each BTS infrastructure can be reduced by co-locating some of the baseband functionality at the C-RAN base station. This reduces idle or extra capacity at the BTS that may not always be optimally utilized. This cost efficiency is often referred to as the pooling gain. The wider adoption of cloud computing allows a shift to a pay-as- you-go model, which is quite common in the public cloud computing space. The big providers of public clouds include the following: Amazon Web Service (AWS) Microsoft Azure Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) Many public cloud providers also have edge clouds to supplement the use cases where the cloud has too high a latency for the specific scenario. We will see in the later Using hybrid cloud section how such edge offerings from cloud providers play an important role in the hybrid cloud-based infrastructure of 5G. NFV makes it possible for core network processing to be done in a virtualized computing environment, achieving hardware independence to a great extent. Coupled with the mainstream use of public cloud in enterprise computing, it sets the stage for the emergence of the RAN-as-a-Service (RANaaS) model. Next, let us look at how C-RAN helps to reduce signal interference. Having a large number of BTSs in a single geographical area can lead to signal interference. However, BBU pooling allows you to centralize some of the baseband functionality in a single master base station. The centralization of the baseband functionality allows better coordination of the transmission between the different types of cells, as shown in Figur