The standards organization 3GPP is exploring new small data delivery techniques for machine-type communications (MTC). It is recognized herein that existing approaches leave the “small data” decision to the service capability server (SCS) for downlink data and to the user equipment (UE) for uplink data. A user equipment (UE) or the core network can identify the services (or flows) that should be characterized as Small Data, and can make decisions as to when to employ optimized Small Data procedures.