form caches alleviate bandwidth). Mitigation techniques: what if the product does not meet performance targets? 3GPP offers several mechanisms to reduce the computational load on the system allowing to make a softer boundary between high-level product specifications and software/systems per- formance achieved. Particularly in multisector applications where a DU is serving more (ide- ally) many sectors, averaging and pooling are in fact intentional techniques rather than mitigations. We explore a few of these techniques here, while noting that the software-centric nature of O-RAN products implies that performance can be yet one more feature that gets upgraded over time. Early deployments that target few users and limited throughput may need less performance than mature products. Bandwidth partitioning (BWP). We explained the concept of "bandwidth partitioning" mainly from the perspective of the client rather than the base station. However, given that BWP provides a fine granularity of control over uplink and downlink air resources (individually!), BWP can be a good tool to explicitly bound both fronthaul bandwidth Chapter 9 Software performance 321 (reduced allocated air interface bandwidth reduces fronthaul bandwidth in a well-defined manner) as well as computational and accelerator/memory IO bandwidth. Other reductions in Physical Layer specifications such as used multiple input multiple output layers, supported modulation type (e.g., 256QAM uplink support), etc. help reduce computational load in a similar manner while maintaining 3GPP compliance of the end- product. Performance-aware scheduling implies making the MAC layer aware of Physical Layer constraints. Consider the example of limited Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) memory or DDR bandwidth where 5G asynchronous HARQ allows the scheduler algorithm to schedule HARQ (re)transmissions based on the knowledge of system limitations rather than only air interface resource availability. Deadline supervision is a technique where a software component does not