In the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm, routers are generic and programmable forwarding units that transmit packets according to a given policy defined by a software controller. Recent research has shown the potential of such a communication concept for Network on Chip (NoC) management, resulting in hardware complexity reduction, management flexibility, real-time guarantees, and self-awareness. This work briefly introduces the SDN concepts for many-cores and shows different studies addressing SDN, including a comparison between centralized and distributed SDN approaches, as well as the use of SDN to self-adaptive management of QoS and faults, and to provide secure application communication at runtime.