After routing the first modified IP/data packets to the appropriate ones of the radio and backhaul protocol stacks and before transmitting the routed data packets to intended destination(s), at S330, the RAN SD i-Switching controller instructs the appropriate one of the servers in the network of servers 106 to which the first modified IP/data packet is transferred, to perform second modification of the IP/Data packets (e.g., perform the second modification on the IP/Data packet(s) that has (have) undergone the first modification first, as described above). The servers that perform first and second modifications may or may not be the same. Furthermore, the server that performs the first and/or second modifications may be the same as the one implementing the RAN SD i-switching controller functionalities.

For example, if the first modification is performed by the server 106-1 by executing the computer-readable instructions corresponding to the radio protocol stack followed by routing the first modified IP/data packet to another server (e.g., server 106-4) implementing a backhaul protocol stack, the RAN SD i-Switching controller instructs the server 106-4 to perform the second modification by executing the compute-readable instructions corresponding to a backhaul protocol stack or a different radio protocol stack (in case the data packet is transmitted from one radio protocol stack to another radio protocol stack).