 distance should be carefully evaluated in determining the proper mode of transport. Some of the available options include dedicated fiber, optical transport network (OTN), 34 passive optical network (PON), 35 microwave, and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) schemes. Mobile operators can further leverage low-cost, high-capacity fronthaul solutions using microwave E-band transport as an advanced application of C-RAN architecture. E-band radios are point-to-point, line-of-sight (LoS) microwave radios operating at 71-86 GHz. 1.1.6.2 Fronthaul Transport and Functional Split Options In a C-RAN architecture, the baseband signal processing is centralized and often moved from individual RRUs to the edge cloud, resulting in a simplified network architecture, smaller form-factor radio units, efficient sharing and use of network resources, reduced costs of equipment installation and site maintenance, and higher spectral efficiency gains from joint processing schemes such as CoMP transmission/reception. However, it is neces- sary to overcome the constraints of fronthaul network transporting the raw in-phase and quadrature (I/Q) digital radio samples from the radio units to the edge cloud for processing. The fronthaul network is traditionally implemented based on the CPRI standard, which cur- rently supports data rates of up to 24 Gbps per cell, a total fronthaul latency up to 200 us, low jitter, tight synchronization, and high reliability. These requirements can only be real- ized with high-capacity fiber or point-to-point wireless links, making the deployment of the fronthaul network very costly, reducing the gains expected from centralization. The most promising approach to reduce the traffic load of the fronthaul interface is through the func- tional split between the edge cloud BBU and the RRU(s). By adopting only partial radio protocol split, the fronthaul requirements can be significantly relaxed while retaining the main centralization benefits. These functional splits blur the difference between classical frontha