grated Access-Backhaul (IAB) (see Section 5.2), which are being developed in 3GPP Release-16, may help alleviate the backhaul issue. 4.6.3.4 Edge Compute Finally, in this section it is worth mentioning multi-access edge compute (MEC). It is not a barrier to small cell deployments, rather an enabler, as small cells combined with MEC are a valuable solution for many low-latency services promised with 5G, and in particular this combination is expected to be the preferred solution for 5G deployments in vertical segments, such as industrial control and autonomous driving (ETSI-MEC). The applicability of MEC solutions to 5G small cell networks will require a small cell net- work to be dimensioned to provide compute capacity for MEC services. In indoor networks this MEC compute is likely to be located in a server room, while for outdoor networks this compute will be at an aggregation point. For further details about MEC, see Section 6.4. 4.6.4 Small Cell Variants With small cells covering a plethora of use cases there are multiple types of small cells and these variations can be broadly split into different groups, each covered in this section: Disaggregation architectures Hardware/platform architectures Operating frequencies Operational modes. 4.6.4.1 Disaggregation Architectures An introduction to and the motivations for improved support of disaggregated networks have already been described earlier in Section 4.1. It is important to note that disaggregation is equally beneficial to small cell networks; in fact LTE small cells were some of the first 4.6 Small Cells Macrocell internet Small cell femtocell Server Server room Small cell nFAPI Small cell Figure 4.6.1 Small cell disaggregation architectures. architectures to adopt disaggregation, in particular with small cell stadium deployments. Figure 4.6.1 shows the four most common disaggregation points within the context of small cell networks. While examples of likely deployments are given for each network split, for a specific deployment there are often several disag