igurations, the combination of an orchestrator capable of supporting a wide range of cloud node sizes, along combination with the approach that treats extremely small access nodes as peripherals, may be an approach for realizing most of the benefits of NFV and SDN for distributed access nodes. The third option provides an alternative to extending a large-scale orchestrator to support small- scale access nodes. In this option, lighter-weight orchestration environments can be developed that can manage local resources for small-scale cloud instantiations. Coordination between the orches- trators and associated ONAP components could potentially be established in a manner similar to the hierarchical controller and subcontroller architecture developed for SDN control functions. This approach could provide nearly all of the benefits of a single orchestrator capable of supporting both very large and very small configurations, at the cost of defining interfaces and behaviors across the orchestrator infrastructure and related systems such as ONAP. Distributed access nodes generally require specialized hardware to carry out specific functions, usually with custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and/or field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). In a conventional network architecture, these hardware functions are specific to each hardware supplier and require custom integrated software from the supplier. Large cloud com- puting data centers gain cost advantages by fully separating the hardware from the software. This provides cost advantages on the hardware side by allowing the use of generic hardware, which could be described in open specification and built by multiple suppliers. This approach provides cost advantages for software by allowing the software to be developed one time (often as open source) independent of the underlying hardware, rather than requiring multiple developments of customized software (and subsequent software upgrades) for each supplier's hardware. The new architecture for access elements