 Therefore, an interwork- ing function for protocol translation is required, which increases the processing overhead and latency, introducing an additional challenge. 6 Enabling Technologies 6.2.7.7 High Availability High availability support also adds some overhead to provide redundancy which in turn impacts edge deployments in terms of cost, for example. However, high availability is not just about adding redundancy in, for example, hardware. It requires the system to per- form even under hardware/software issues to provide 5 9's reliability. Containers are better suited for high availability, as they have faster platform orchestration support (e.g. auto spinning up new containers on failure) compared with VMs. Additionally, there are also geo-redundancy requirements in most Tier-1 operators. This requires careful design on the RAN to balance performance requirements for reliability versus increased amount of hard- ware for redundancy. This is further elaborated upon in Chapter 7. 6.2.7.8 Power Consumption Average power consumption for 2G-4G base station site is around 6 kW, which may raise to 10 kW at peak loads (Steven Carlini, 2019). This is expected to increase with 5G higher data rates, even though the average energy per bit will decrease. With increased densification of cell sites in 5G, power consumption is an important consideration with green initiatives from government and regulators. The CoTS hardware (common in virtualization) is inherently less power-efficient com- pared with ASIC and dedicated hardware implementations. Furthermore, in order to meet stringent timing requirements, power-saving options are often disabled in hardware plat- form used for the virtualized NG-RAN. For example, enabling sleep mode in a CPU per- forming scheduling operations at sub-milliseconds is a challenge. In order to make power-saving feasible, new basic input/output system (BIOS) and oper- ating system settings need to be explored for virtualization of NG-RAN. Currently, all mod- ern processors have power-saving featu