The tunneling technology used for the fabric data plane is based on Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN). VXLAN encapsulation is UDP based, meaning that it can be forwarded by any IP-based network (legacy or third party) and creates the overlay network for the SD-Access fabric. Although LISP is the control plane for the SD-Access fabric, it does not use LISP data encapsulation for the data plane; instead, it uses VXLAN encapsulation because it is capable of encapsulating the original Ethernet header to perform MAC-in-IP encapsulation, while LISP does not. Using VXLAN allows the SD-Access fabric to support Layer 2 and Layer 3 virtual topologies (overlays) and the ability to operate over any IP-based network with built-in network segmentation (VRF instance/VN) and built-in group-based policy.