 timeouts and large amounts of retransmissions. In a 5G network, since all the signaling protocols between network functions (NFs) are HTTP-based, it is important to meet latency requirements as there would be retries for each timeout. This can cause a signal storm in the network that will hog up bandwidth that can otherwise be used for processing calls. What is the right data center design? There are many choices available as far as the data center design is concerned. This ranges from hosting NFs completely in a public cloud to hosting them completely in the service provider network: Service Provider Network Public Cloud Public Cloud Cloud Sites Central Normal Central Regional Near Edge Far Edge Data Center Data Center Data Center Data Center Analytics Engine MEC, IOT, vRAN Radio and vRAN 5G Core Control 5G Core User Management Plane Componets (CU/CU componets Plane Automation Engine (RU/DU+RU) Figure 11.2 - Options for hosting network functions 5G SA network design fundamentals The preceding figure explains a few possible ways of laying out a data center. For example, in a large macro 5G network, the mobile network operator may choose to host certain analytics engines, automation engines, and more in a public cloud. Then, for a large geography, the service provider network can be further subdivided into national data centers, regional data centers, near-edge data centers, and far-edge data centers. The national data center can host control plane functions centrally, especially the ones that are not sensitive to latency. Then, regional data centers can have user planes that can cater to low-latency requirements. Near- edge data centers can host centralized components of the distributed RAN and far-edge data centers can host the radio heads. Though it is completely possible to co-locate most of these data centers, it's a best practice to segregate them. This will help in building the capabilities of geo-redundancy as multiple data centers of each kind can serve as backup servers in case of one data center failur