The IP network was a network that was designed to be best effort, and wasn’t designed to support complex functionalities such as address translation, tunneling and queuing. Also, the design was based on a single plane just to maintain the forwarding table in the data plane. However, today’s networks are split into three parts:

All these parts are coupled together in today’s network nodes . However, this raises alot of obstacles because they cause an increase in the network complexity. Therefore, the research community starting looking for an alternative, an easy way to decouple the functionalities of a network node into a separate planes. The research towards such objective is not completely new, it has been there for the past decade, but it did get the attention of the research community till a year ago.