  Private 5G networks will soon be ubiquitous across the future-generation
smart wireless access infrastructures hosting a wide range of
performance-critical applications. A high-performing User Plane Function (UPF)
in the data plane is critical to achieving such stringent performance goals, as
it governs fast packet processing and supports several key control-plane
operations. Based on a private 5G prototype implementation and analysis, it is
imperative to perform dynamic resource management and orchestration at the UPF.
This paper leverages Mobile Edge Cloud-Intelligent Agent (MEC-IA), a logically
centralized entity that proactively distributes resources at UPF for various
service types, significantly reducing the tail latency experienced by the user
requests while maximizing resource utilization. Extending the MEC-IA
functionality to MEC layers further incurs data plane latency reduction. Based
on our extensive simulations, under skewed uRLLC traffic arrival, the MEC-IA
assisted bestfit UPF-MEC scheme reduces the worst-case latency of UE requests
by up to 77.8% w.r.t. baseline. Additionally, the system can increase uRLLC
connectivity gain by 2.40x while obtaining 40% CapEx savings.
