Software-Defined Data Plane Enhancing SDN and NFV

In this paper, we posit that extension of SDN to support deeply and flexibly programmable, software-defined data plane significantly enhance SDN and NFV and their interaction in terms of (1) enhanced interaction between applications and networks, (2) optimization of network functions, and (3) rapid development of new network protocols. All of these benefits are expected to contribute to improving the quality of diversifying communication networks and services. We identify three major technical challenges for enabling software-defined data plane as (1) ease of programming, (2) reasonable and predictable performance and (3) isolation among multiple concurrent logics. We also promote applicationdriving thinking towards defining software defined data-plane. We briefly introduce our project FLARE and its related technologies and review four use cases of flexible and deeply programmable data plane. key words: Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV), network virtualization