and precision sensitive. These devices are distinguished in terms of diverse media types, such as audio, visual, haptic, vestibular, etc. The devices may be con- nected to a network either via a wired connection (e.g., Ethernet or optical transport) or a wireless connection (e.g., cellular, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth). The cloud radio access model includes both composite and heterogeneous types of access, where moving the computa- tional complexity and storage from the device to the edge of the network would enable diverse services using a variety of device types (e.g., H-H, H-M, and M-M) and would enable energy conservation in the devices with limited computing/storage resources. Flexibility applies not only to network hardware and software but also to network manage- ment. An example would be the automation of network instance setup in the context of net- work slicing that relies on optimization of different NFs to deliver a specific service satisfying certain service requirements. Flexible management will enable future networks to support new types of service offerings that previously would have made no technical or eco- nomic sense. Many aspects of the 5G network architecture need to be flexible to allow ser- vices to scale. It is likely that networks will need to be deployed using different hardware technologies with different feature sets implemented at different physical locations in the 6 Chapter 1 network depending on the use case. In some use cases, the majority of user-plane traffic may require only very simple processing, which can be run on low-cost hardware, whereas other traffic may require more advanced/complex processing. Cost-efficient scaling of the user plane to handle the increasing individual and aggregated bandwidths is a key compo- nent of a 5GC network. As we mentioned earlier, supporting the separation of the control-plane and user-plane functions is one of the most significant principles of the 5GC network architecture. The separation allows control- and user-plane resources to scale independe