ted, with voice, SMS, and low-bandwidth data being the primary, if not exclusive, usage. At that time, optimizing a limited number of parameters has been sufficient to develop cellular network deployment plans meeting the required objectives. Over the years, with growing volumes of non-human-originated traffic, an increasing number of additional requirements on the wireless access technology and radio access net- work have emerged. As a result, meeting "the customer's" expectations has become sig- nificantly more challenging for operators; this trend is expected to continue in the future. Furthermore, the nature of traffic consumed by human users has changed as well, from voice and messaging, to video streaming and gaming, to possibly virtual reality (VR) and other applications in the future. Therefore, one key deployment objective for NG-RAN is to expand beyond the existing 4G mobile broadband use case, which has been successful in providing users with wide coverage, average throughputs of several tens of Mbps, and peak throughputs of the order 5G Radio Access Network Architecture: The Dark Side of 5G, First Edition. Edited by Sasha Sirotkin. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 7 NG-RAN Deployment Considerations of 1 Gbps. This enabled proliferation of a wide range of digital applications for users and at the same time set a higher expectation of what can be achieved through 5G networks. With 5G, operators need to adapt to evolving customer needs and provide new services that enhance the customer's experience beyond what can be imagined today. To this end NG-RAN should be designed and dimensioned to provide faster downloads and lower latency, and enable new experiences on mobile devices. However, NG-RAN deployments aim to offer Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) not only for use cases involving human-operated devices but also for use cases involving Internet of Things (IoT) devices with each use case having its own service criteria. Different 5G use cases may need different RAN deploy