Abstract:Network abstraction brings about the naissance of software-defined networking. SDN decouples data plane and control plane, and simplifies network management. The paper starts with a discussion on the background in the naissance and developments of SDN, combing its architecture that includes data layer, control layer and application layer. Then their key technologies are elaborated according to the hierarchical architecture of SDN. The characteristics of consistency, availability, and tolerance are especially analyzed. Moreover, latest achievements for profiled scenes are introduced. The future works are summarized in the end.