What are two examples of components that are part of an SDN architecture?

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architecture is based on the logical decoupling of the control and data planes. According to the SDN reference model, the architecture typically includes the following planes:

Control Plane: This resides in the SDN controller and is responsible for decision-making, including route and policy calculations.

Application Plane: This layer contains business and network applications (e.g., firewalls, QoS policies) that communicate with the controller to request services and enforce policy.

These planes are essential in SDN architecture:

The control plane programs the forwarding behavior of network elements.

The application plane interacts via northbound APIs to define intent and service logic.

Options such as “Software plane” and “Network plane” are vague or not used in the SDN context. The “Management plane” is a separate functional layer and is not part of the architectural definition core to SDN as per CCDE v3.1.

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