e success of 5G rollouts, enabling agile infrastructure that can adapt to network slicing, low latency, and high-capacity requirements of major 5G use cases. One of the key architectural enhancements in 3GPP's 5G network is control- and user-plane separation (CUPS) of EPC nodes, which enables flexible network deployment and operation Forwarding and control element separation defines an architectural framework and associated protocols to standardize information exchange between the control plane and the user/forwarding plane in a forwarding and control element separation network element. IETF RFC 3654 and RFC 3746 have defined the forwarding and control element separation requirements and framework, respectively (see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5810). 5G Network Architecture 29 by distributed or centralized deployment and the independent scaling between control-plane and user-plane functions. In other words, the network equipment is now changing from closed and vendor-specific to open and generic with SDN architectural model, which enables the separation of control and data planes, and allows networks to be programmed through open interfaces. With NFV, network functions that were previously realized in costly customized-hardware platforms are now implemented as software appliances running on low-cost commodity hardware or running in cloud computing environments. By splitting the network entities in this manner (i.e., from serving gateway (SGW) to SGW-C and SGW-U and from packet gateway (PGW) to PGW-C and PGW-U), it is possible to scale these components independently and to enable a range of deployment options. The protocol used between the control and user planes can be either an extension of the existing OpenFlow protocol or new interfaces which have been specified as part of 3GPP CUPS work item [1]. 1.1.3.1 Architectural Aspects Next-generation networks are experiencing an increase in use of very dense deployments where user terminals will be able to simultaneously connect to multiple transmission points. It 