rovide edge computing functionality (see Section 6.4), all of which rely on the availability of edge com- pute resources. To account for these new features, which can also become additional failure points, the cellular industry may consider adapting a classification similar to the ones used in data centers. For example, the tier rating defined by the Uptime Institute (Uptime Insti- tute Tier Standard) may be a helpful starting point. 7 NG-RAN Deployment Considerations Four tiers defined by the Uptime Institute are: Tier I: no redundant IT equipment, 99.671% availability. Tier II: some redundant infrastructure, 99.741% availability. Tier III: additional data paths, more redundant equipment, which is all dual powered, 99.982% availability. Tier IV: fault tolerance, all cooling equipment is dual powered, 99.995% availability. Tier IV is designed to guarantee "zero single points of failure." A Tier IV provider needs to ensure redundancies for every process and data protection stream. Any outage or error must not shut down the system. 2N + 1 redundancy needs to be provided, meaning the provisioned infrastructure is two times the amount required for operation plus a backup. A Tier IV infrastructure needs to foresee a 96-hour power outage protection. Even though Tier IV is economically challenging, it may be feasible for a centralized data center. However, for a distributed infrastructure such as a mobile network providing a full nationwide coverage, it is questionable whether providing Tier IV reliability will justify the investment in the long run. Hence operators are likely to focus on selected customers with a need for such high availability requirements in a small coverage footprint only, for example, factories and enterprise campuses, while most other deployments will have to rely on a lower tier. 7.3.3 Service Fulfillment Criteria As discussed previously, for the MBB use cases in the past, one of the major benchmarks was CPP accompanied by certain (e.g. average and minimum) data throughput thresholds. This remain