SDN Architecture

Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach to computer networking that allows network administrators to manage network services through abstraction of higher-level functionality. This is done by decoupling the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent (the control plane) from the underlying systems that forward traffic to the selected destination (the data plane).

SDN was commonly associated with the OpenFlow protocol (for remote communication with network plane elements) since the latter's emergence in 2011.