What is the role of the control plane in a network device?

The control plane is responsible for exchanging routing table information, building the routing table, and making decisions about the best path for traffic. This includes running routing protocols like OSPF or EIGRP to learn routes from other devices. "Provides CLI access" is a management plane function, allowing administrators to configure and monitor the device. "Performs FIB lookups" and "Forwards traffic to the next hop" are data plane functions. The data plane uses the Forwarding Information Base (FIB), which is derived from the routing table, to quickly forward packets based on destination IP addresses. The control plane informs the data plane, but does not perform the actual forwarding.