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As the prevailing technique of software-defined networking (SDN), open flow introduces significant programmability, granularity, and flexibility for many network applications to effectively manage and process network flows. However, open flow only provides a simple “match-action” paradigm and lacks the functionality of stateful forwarding for the SDN data plane, which limits its ability to support advanced network applications. Heavily relying on SDN controllers for all state maintenance incurs both scalability and performance issues. In this paper, we propose a novel stateful data plane architecture (SDPA) for the SDN data plane. A co-processing unit, forwarding processor (FP), is designed for SDN switches to manage state information through new instructions and state tables. We design and implement an extended open flow protocol to support the communication between the controller and FP. To demonstrate the …