rocessing. 3.3.1.2 Control Plane The control plane is characterized by logic, which generally relates to handling of communica- tions between network functions, and not directly related to end-to-end user communications. This includes signaling protocol handling, session management or authorization, authentication, and accounting (AAA) functions, and routing protocols. These functions are expected to have lower transaction rates with a commensurate increase in the complexity of processing required for each transaction, SO network I/O is generally not expected to be as heavily utilized as for a data plane workload. Instead, CPU resources and/or memory resources are more likely to be bottlenecks. The most common control plane workload is routing protocols such as open shortest path first (OSPF), BGP, LDP, etc. Routing protocols are employed to serve the data plane. Routing in IP networks generally uses distributed control planes, where each local router is responsible for cre- ating its own forwarding tables based on the control plane data it receives from other routers or from centralized control plane functions such as RRs. AT&T's core network is based on MPLS technology. At a high level, MPLS networks use a combination of multiprotocol BGP and label switching for differentiating and segregating routing information and traffic flows between VPNs. RRs are used to distribute routes to the edges. Additional control plane elements exist, namely, DNS, DHCP, Signaling for VoIP, etc. As we migrate control plane functions to the cloud, existing standalone control plane elements such as RR and DNS servers are the ideal first candidates since they are already disaggregated and perform a unique core function. PE routers for VPN services are more complex because their pri- mary function is packet processing, yet they support many control plane protocols and workloads. Currently, the routing and forwarding engines can be disaggregated and supported on different cores. But control plane protocols like BGP are still integrated 