Which software-defined architecture plane provides Layer 2 reachability and Layer 3 routing information to assist forwarding decisions?

The control plane is responsible for making forwarding decisions. It builds and maintains the routing tables (Layer 3) and ARP tables (Layer 2), which contain the necessary information for devices to know where to send traffic. The management plane is used for device configuration and monitoring. The data plane (or forwarding plane) is where the actual data packets are forwarded based on the decisions made by the control plane. The policy plane, while related to SDN, is more about defining business rules and translating them into network configurations, rather than directly providing reachability and routing information for forwarding.