*2.1.1 Data plane*

Data plane in the SDNMS-PAI consists of the forwarding devices (known as the infrastructure or the underlying network). The matching of the packets in the data plane and the actions take place according to the forwarding rules that are defined in a flow Table. A flow table comprises of several flow entries. The packet header information is matched with the flow entries in the flow table. Each flow entry has three mandatory fields, i.e., header, action, and counter. **Table 1** is an example of a flow table in which the first row contains header fields and second and onward rows contain flow entries.

When a new packet arrives on the ingress port of a switch, the matching process starts, if a packet has a destination IP address starting with 172.10.X.X then forward it to port number 8 and counter 201 will be updated. Similarly, the third row (with source IP address: 10.10.1.X) explains if a packet has the same source and destination port number (X) then drop it. If the rules for the new packet do not exist in the flow table then the switch sends a Packet\_In message to the controller and the destination will be returned by the controller to the forwarding device (Packet\_Out message) and the flow rules will be updated in the flow table, respectively. In contrast to traditional networks where the decision about the routing takes place in the tightly couple distributed networking devices. Herein, in the SDNMS-PAI, the information of the network is collected via the LCs which is used by the AI enabled

**Figure 3.**

*AI powered SDN architecture for E2E resource allocation.*


*Management of Software-Defined Networking Powered by Artificial Intelligence DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.97197*

#### **Table 1.**

*An example of the flow table entries.*

global control plane (AIGCP) for deciding about the global optimum policy and E2E resources allocation.
