ntly and supports migration to cloud-based deployments. By separating user- and control-plane resources, the user-plane/control-plane entities may also be implemented/instantiated in different logi- cal/physical locations. For example, the control plane can be implemented in a central site, which makes management and operation less complex and the user plane can be dis- tributed over a number of local sites, moving it closer to the user. This is beneficial, as it shortens the round-trip time between the user and the network service, and reduces the amount of bandwidth required between sites. Content caching is an example of how locat- ing functions on a local site reduces the required bandwidth between sites. Separation of the control and user planes is a fundamental concept of SDN, as the flexibility of 5GC networks will improve significantly by adopting SDN principles. User-plane protocols, which can be seen as a chain of functions, can be deployed to suit a specific use case. Given that the connectivity needs of each use case varies, the most cost-efficient deploy- ment can be uniquely created for each scenario. For example, the connectivity needs for a massive machine type communication (mMTC) service characterized by small payload and low mobility are quite different from the needs of an enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) service with large payload and high mobility characteristics. An eMBB service can be broken down into several subservices, such as video streaming and web browsing, which can in turn be implemented by separate functional chains within the network slice. Such additional decomposition within the user-plane domain further increases the flexibil- ity of the core network. The separation of the control and user planes enables the use of different processing platforms for each one. Similarly, different user planes can be deployed with different run-time platforms within a user plane, all depending on the cost efficiency of the solution. In the eMBB use case, one functional chain of services may run 