The journal article Software-Defined Networking: A Comprehensive Survey (D. Kreutz, F. M. V. Ramos, P. E. Veríssimo, C. E. Rothenberg, S. Azodolmolky and S. Uhlig, in Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 103, no. 1, pp. 14-76, Jan. 2015) defines SDN as having four characteristics:
- The control plane is decoupled from the data plane. Data plane hardware becomes simple packet-forwarding devices.
- All forwarding decisions are flow-based rather than destination-based. A flow is a set of packets that match a criterion or filter. All packets in a flow are treated with the same forwarding and service policies. Flow programming allows for easy scaling and flexibility with virtual switches, firewalls, and middleware.
- The control logic is ...