IMPLEMENTING EPC IN A CLOUD COMPUTER WITH OPENFLOW DATA PLANE

A method implements a control plane of an evolved packet core (EPC) of a long term evolution (LTE) network in a cloud computing system. A cloud manager monitors resource utilization of each control plane module and the control plane traffic handled by each control plane module. The cloud manager detects a threshold level of resource utilization or traffic load for one of the plurality of control plane modules of the EPC. A new control plane module is initialized as a separate virtual machine by the cloud manager in response to detecting the threshold level. The new control plane module signals the plurality of network elements in the data plane to establish flow rules and actions to establish differential routing of flows in the data plane using the control protocol, wherein flow matches are encoded using an extensible match structure in which the flow match is encoded as a type-length -value (TLV).