Abstract
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) research, from the beginning, focuses more on the development and programmability of the control plane. In this paper, first we posit that we need data plane focused research in addition to control plane for SDN. Then, we review data plane related contributions in SDN to indicate there is a gap that need to be considered from the community. Next, we review some existing technologies that can be used to realize a software-centric SDN data plane compared with the current hardware-centric proposals. Finally, we discuss challenges and directions for the community as the future steps in SDN data plane development.