In software-defined architectures, which plane is distributed and responsible for traffic forwarding?

The management plane is responsible for configuration, monitoring, and management of network devices, not for traffic forwarding.

The control plane is responsible for making forwarding decisions and populating forwarding tables, but it does not directly forward traffic; it instructs the data plane.

The policy plane is a higher-level conceptual layer that defines network behavior, which the control plane then translates into specific forwarding instructions.

The data plane, also known as the forwarding plane, is responsible for the physical movement of data packets according to the forwarding tables and rules established by the control plane. In SDN, this function remains distributed among the network devices.