Software defined networking for resilient communications in Smart Grid active distribution networks
Emerging Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology provides excellent flexibility to large scale networks in terms of control, management, security, and maintenance. In this paper, we propose an SDN based communication infrastructure for Smart Grid distribution networks among substations. A Smart Grid communication infrastructure consists of a large number of heterogenous devices that exchange real time information for monitoring the status of the grid. We then investigate how SDN enabled Smart Grid infrastructure can provide resilience to active distribution substations with self recovery. Specifically, by introducing redundant and wireless communication links that can be used during the emergencies, we show that SDN controllers can be effective for restoring the communication while providing a lot of flexibility. Furthermore, to be able to effectively evaluate the performance of the proposed work in terms of various fine grained network metrics, we developed a Mininet based testing framework and integrated it with ns 3 network simulator. Finally, we conducted experiments by using actual Smart Grid communication data to assess the recovery performance of the proposed SDN based system. The results show that SDN is a viable technology for the Smart Grid communications with almost negligible delays in switching to backup wireless links during the times of link failures in reliable fashion.
2016 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)