. ¶ Data plane dependencies also affect applications in a NOC such as SDN controller applications: certain network changes are hard to implement today because the change itself may affect reachability of the devices. Examples include address or mask changes, routing changes, or security policies. Today such changes require precise, hop-by-hop planning. ¶ Note that specific control plane functions for the data plane often depend on the ability to forward their packets via the data plane:...