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Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

Mubashir Husain Rehmani, Alan Davy, Brendan Jennings, Chadi Assi

arXiv:1801.04613v4cs.NI

TL;DR

The paper addresses the complexity, manual management, and heterogeneity of smart-grid communication systems. It surveys SDN-based SGC across its advantages, architectures, routing, security, privacy, and research challenges, concluding that the area is established in several domains but still has underexplored applications and resilience issues.

  • Problem

    Smart-grid communication must support diverse traffic and services, but current management is complex and manual, while heterogeneous devices and protocols create interoperability challenges.

  • Method

    The paper conducts a comprehensive survey of SDN-based smart-grid communication, covering advantages, architectures, case studies, routing, security and privacy schemes, challenges, and future directions.

  • Results

    The survey finds SDN-based SGC widely applied to resilience, stability, and traffic optimization, while several other application areas remain insufficiently explored.

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    SDN-based SGC provides a broad basis for managing smart-grid communication, but further investigation is needed for underexplored applications and distributed control concerns.

Abstract

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The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.

I. INTRODUCTION

The paper motivates SDN-based smart-grid communication by contrasting the evolving, communication-dependent smart grid with aging, manually managed, heterogeneous infrastructure. It surveys SDN-based SGC advantages, architectures, routing, security, privacy, challenges, and future directions.

  • Motivation: Growing demand, aging infrastructure, reliability problems, and renewable integration motivate transforming the conventional grid into a smart grid.The smart grid adds two-way communication, demand-side management, real-time pricing, and self-healing capabilities.
  • Motivation: Smart-home renewable generation and energy exchange require efficient, reliable communication for supervision, monitoring, billing, scheduling, and meter management.Smart homes can inject energy into the grid, while information flows among meters, AMI, and utilities.
  • Communication challenges: Existing SG communication faces reconfiguration burdens and interoperability concerns because services use diverse vendor-specific devices and protocols.MPLS-based routers may require reconfiguration when new services are added, potentially disrupting utility services.
  • SDN rationale: SDN separates control and data planes and can support global network management, dynamic routing, load balancing, failure detection, security, and self-healing in SG communication.These capabilities are presented as potential improvements in communication efficiency and resiliency.
  • Survey scope: The survey classifies SDN-based SGC advantages, reviews architectures and case studies, examines routing and security/privacy schemes, and identifies open issues and future research directions.Its claimed scope spans both SDN and smart-grid communication rather than treating either area separately.
  • Survey scope: The authors position the survey as a comprehensive joint review because prior surveys generally addressed SDN or smart grids separately, while existing SDN-in-SG studies were not comprehensive.The review covers advantages, architectures, routing, security schemes, challenges, and future directions.

III. SG AND SDNS: BACKGROUND, TERMINOLOGY, AND DEFINITIONS

The section introduces smart-grid communication requirements and explains why traditional systems face resilience, interoperability, granularity, security, privacy, and management problems.

  • Smart Grid Background: Smart grids address aging infrastructure, frequent failures, one-way communication, and limited support for emerging power services and applications.
  • Smart Grid Background: Smart grids require enhanced wired or wireless communication technologies to control diverse utility- and consumer-side applications.
  • SG Communication Issues: SG communication systems must adapt quickly to communication-link failures and attacks to restore operational service.
  • SG Communication Issues: Vendor-specific devices and protocols create interoperability problems, while differing monitoring granularity causes synchronization problems in traffic and flow management.
  • SG Communication Issues: Security and privacy remain concerns because attacks such as link flooding and smart-meter data manipulation can deteriorate SG performance.
  • SG Communication Issues: Current SG network management is complex, time consuming, and manual, including administrator intervention to restore operations.

B. Software Defined Networks

SDN provides programmable, logically centralized network control for smart-grid communication, and the section surveys its architecture and use across several SG scenarios.

  • Software Defined Networks: SDN emerged to replace inflexible manual network configuration with programmable control that can respond to dynamic environments and applications.
  • Software Defined Networks: A centralized SDN controller maintains a global network view and can make forwarding and routing decisions for switches.
  • Software Defined Networks: OpenFlow uses switches, controllers, and flow entries, with controllers installing flow rules in switch flow tables.
  • Case Studies: SDN-based SGC is examined through case studies covering substation automation, utility M2M applications, and cloud- and IoT-based applications.
  • Case Studies: The S3N architecture provides a framework for substation automation.
  • Case Studies: SDECN supports substation auto-configuration and traffic isolation without configuring multiple VLANs, with evaluation using a RYU controller and Mininet emulations.

2) Utility M2M Applications:

Utility M2M applications connect diverse devices to a Utility Data and Control Center, while SDN supports mobility management, resource allocation, traffic isolation, prioritization, and network flexibility.

  • Utility M2M Applications: An SDN-based EV energy-management system tracks 100 EVs, including battery status, location, and charging time.
  • Utility M2M Applications: The EV energy-management system uses SDN to improve EV mobility management and facilitate resource allocation.
  • Traffic Management: SDN can identify traffic types and dynamically prioritize them according to reliability, delay, throughput, and application requirements.
  • Traffic Management: SDN can isolate traffic and applications, create virtual network slices with separate policies, and adapt PMU traffic to receiving-device capabilities.
  • Operational Advantages: SDN supports resilience and fast failure recovery by redirecting flows, while open standards improve interoperability across devices and protocols.

B. SG Resilience

SDN-based SGC supports resilience and self-healing by rerouting traffic around failed or compromised communication links and monitoring the network centrally.

  • SG Resilience: SG resilience requires recovery from sudden failures and malicious attacks while maintaining critical services.
  • Link-Failure Resilience: When a wired link fails, an SDN controller can redirect flows to a healthy wireless link as a backup path.
  • Inter-Substation Communication: An SDN-based inter-substation network introduces global and local SDN controllers for communication across substations.
  • Self-Healing: Compromising a PDC can collapse SG state monitoring even when PMUs remain functional, because the PDC forwards measurements from multiple PMUs.
  • Self-Healing: An ILP and a heuristic algorithm reroute uncompromised PMU data to reliable PDCs using IEEE 30-bus and 118-bus topologies.
  • Self-Healing: The proposed linear program reduced latency by up to 75%, while the heuristic algorithm reduced latency further at up to 25% additional overhead.

3) Fast Failover:

SDN-based smart-grid communication uses fast failover, failure detection, recovery, and post-recovery optimization to maintain communication during link failures. Surveyed approaches include centralized, decentralized, and hybrid designs, with trade-offs among recovery time, path quality, and overhead.

  • Fast Failover: Fast failover reroutes packets through an alternative path without consulting the SDN controller after a communication-link failure.This mechanism is available in OpenFlow 1.3 and later.
  • Fast Failover: Flow Validator requires nine times less time than recomputing link-failure or restoration changes from scratch.The prototype uses the North Bound Interface to collect SDN state and configure fast failover.
  • Fault Tolerance: Fault-tolerance designs address link-failure detection, recovery, and post-recovery optimization using centralized, decentralized, or hybrid approaches.The evaluated designs used BFD, heartbeat mechanisms, fast-failover groups, and optimized paths.
  • Fault Tolerance: The hybrid approach achieved better recovery time and path quality than centralized and decentralized approaches, but incurred more overhead.The centralized approach performed better in recovery time and optimization than the controller-based heartbeat approach, while the latter provided better paths.
  • Applications and Extensions: SDN-based fault-tolerance schemes reduce end-to-end delay, diagnose faults quickly, and support recovery in substation and wide-area smart-grid settings.The surveyed studies include an SDN architecture with lower end-to-end delay and an SDH-based approach for quick fault diagnosis and network expansion.
  • Link Failure Detection: SLICE detects and synchronizes communication-link interruptions, while SUCCESS provides an SDN controller for alternative-link selection.SLICE uses custom hardware connected to GPS through a GPIO interface.

9) SDN Controller Failure:

SDN controller failures can disrupt smart-grid communication because switches depend on timely flow entries, making controller reliability a critical concern. The surveyed work addresses related network-management and load-management needs through SDN-based coordination and path selection.

  • SDN Controller Failure: Controller hardware, software, communication, malware, or application faults can cause random failures or delayed responses in smart-grid communication.Delayed controller responses may cause severe packet drops because switches must receive flow entries within a time limit.
  • SDN Controller Failure: SDN controller failure can severely affect automatic gain control, which maintains and regulates grid frequency.The impact was studied using the IEEE 37-bus system, Mininet, PowerWorld, and real SDN switches.
  • Voltage Stability: Multi-agent systems combined with SDN support voltage stability by allowing substation agents to communicate control information directly to the SDN controller.The controller establishes forwarding rules after receiving information from the agents.
  • Load Balancing and Management: SDN selects less overloaded links during post-recovery optimization to address congestion and packet loss caused by uneven link loading.The approach uses the controller to select alternative links after failures.
  • Load Balancing and Management: OpenAMI achieves low end-to-end delay and higher throughput by selecting shortest routes while balancing traffic across the AMI network.The scheme is designed for load balancing in AMI networks using an SDN controller.
  • Microgrid Coordination: SDN connects closely coupled networked microgrids so power deficiency and recovery can be managed through event-triggered communication links.The study used an OPAL-RT simulator and the RYU SDN controller.

1) Packet Forwarding Performance:

SDN-based smart-grid communication improves traffic forwarding, flow management, bandwidth allocation, and network monitoring across substation, AMI, and heterogeneous communication settings. The surveyed literature also identifies placement, expansion, sensing, reconfiguration, and state-estimation problems as related research areas.

  • Packet Forwarding Performance: SDN-based flow management increases smart-meter fairness by aggregating and scheduling flows to provide each meter a uniform flow-level share.The evaluation used NS-3 and Mininet, with Jain’s index used as a fairness measure.
  • Packet Forwarding Performance: SDN enables flow aggregation, scheduling, and load balancing for IEC 61850 substation traffic using OpenFlow and a Floodlight controller.The scheme was evaluated through Mininet.
  • Packet Forwarding Performance: Bandwidth improvement reaches 90% for IEC 61850 substation devices using an SDN controller, OpenFlow, Mininet, and OpenvSwitch.The result comes from a proposed bandwidth-allocation scheme.
  • Network Placement: AMI concentrator placement balances congestion risk against resource underutilization, while controller placement has been evaluated for multiple smart-grid applications.The controller-placement study considered distribution automation, demand response, smart-meter reading, and outage management.
  • Other Network Functions: SDN-related studies examine aggregation-point deployment, automatic network reconfiguration, state estimation, and monitoring across heterogeneous links.The monitoring study compared software-based and hardware-based SDN switches over wireless, Gigabit Ethernet, and broadband power-line links.
  • Other Network Functions: Battery-status sensing in software-defined vehicle-to-grid architecture uses multicast to reduce average delay across vehicle-to-grid services.The proposed scheme is called BSS-SDN.

F. Summary and Lessons Learned

The survey finds that SDN-based smart-grid communication has been widely studied for resilience, stability, and traffic optimization, while several other application areas remain less explored. It also organizes architectures across optical, wireless-sensor, and vehicle-to-grid or grid-to-vehicle networks.

  • F. Summary and Lessons Learned: SDN-based smart-grid communication research primarily addresses resilience, stability, and traffic optimization, with additional advantages appearing in other areas.The survey also reports benefits for unicast, multicast, and broadcast message delivery compared with traditional routing approaches.
  • F. Summary and Lessons Learned: Network expansion, battery-status sensing, state estimation, and autonomic network configuration remain areas requiring further investigation.The survey identifies these topics as future research directions because their advantages are not fully explored.
  • SDN-Based SGC Architectures: Surveyed SDN-based communication architectures span optical networks, wireless sensor networks, and vehicle-to-grid or grid-to-vehicle networks.The architecture literature includes general smart-grid designs and specialized software-defined wireless-sensor architectures.
  • Optical Networks: Hybrid opto-electronic Ethernet architecture targets lower delay for IEC 61850 sampled-value messages in substation communication.The architecture is based on SDN and is discussed alongside its routing design.
  • Optical Networks: An SDN-based cyber-physical interdependency model using optical links seeks to avoid cascading failures in smart-grid control messaging.The approach was evaluated on 24-node US and 28-node EU physical topologies, where comparatively fewer node failures were reported.

C. SDN-based SGC architectures applied to Vehicles

The surveyed vehicle-focused SDN architectures support V2G, PEV integration, charging networks, and related cellular resource management. They use layered or tiered designs to coordinate energy, communication, mobility, security, and spectrum resources.

  • V2G architectures: V2G architectures use SDN to coordinate electric vehicles that inject energy into the smart grid for stabilization or peak-demand support.Proposals include decentralized cloud, fog, and cloud SDN architectures with dynamic pricing for charging and discharging.
  • V2G architectures: SDN-V2G designs commonly separate application, control, and data or physical planes, with controllers handling management, configuration, topology, and flow decisions.Some designs connect planes through northbound and southbound interfaces and include applications for alarms, maintenance, secure communication, and intelligent decisions.
  • PEV integration: PEV integration frameworks organize applications into tiers for primary and secondary feeders, covering monitoring and demand response for large and small grid components.
  • V2G architectures: Green V2G architectures divide the data plane into stationary and dynamic components while assigning energy and data control to SDN controllers.
  • V2G architectures: Wi-V2G uses an IEEE 802.11-based multihop wireless mesh network and is reported to provide low infrastructure cost, high-mobility support, and real-time charging-station state transmission.The design was evaluated with the Exata emulator.
  • Research directions: The surveyed architecture literature covers vehicles and cellular networks, but identifies a need for unified V2G/G2V designs and new frameworks for energy Internet, information-centric networking, and virtual private networks.

VI. ROUTING SCHEMES FOR SDN-BASED SGC

Routing research for SDN-based smart-grid communication spans unicast, multicast, and broadcast delivery, with SDN controllers supporting path optimization, traffic management, resilience, and privacy. The surveyed applications include general grid, V2G, PMU, substation, and industrial communication networks.

  • Routing taxonomy: Routing schemes are classified by message delivery as unicast, multicast, or broadcast, according to whether messages target one destination, a group, or all nodes.
  • Unicast routing: Unicast schemes use SDN controllers for shortest-path restoration, constrained path selection, data reduction, fault handling, and traffic-flow harmonization.Examples include NOX, Floodlight, and OpenFlow-based approaches.
  • Unicast routing: DCSP achieved higher bandwidth and lower delay than Dijkstra in a Mininet and Floodlight evaluation using the New England Test Power System.
  • Unicast routing: EPCS reduces generated big data with tensor-based dimensionality reduction, then selects routes using latency, load, bandwidth, channel capacity, and QoS requirements.The reported outcomes are increased throughput and minimized delay.
  • Multicast routing: Multicast routing disseminates time-critical control, measurement, emergency, firmware-update, and appliance-control information to multiple smart-grid recipients.The surveyed deployments include V2G, PMU, and substation communication networks.
  • Multicast routing: PMU multicast traffic is demanding because utilities require different packet rates, while wide-area monitoring requires 20-200 ms delay and 99.99% reliability.SDN programmability is used to address multicast and multirate PMU traffic.

2) Multicast Routing Schemes for PMU Network:

PMU multicast routing addresses high-speed, multirate delivery of measurement data to multiple utilities and emphasizes reliability, packet-loss detection, backup paths, and fault recovery. The surveyed schemes use OpenFlow and SDN-enabled multicast mechanisms in PMU and substation settings.

  • PMU multicast schemes: APPLESEED combines PCOUNT, MULTICAST RECYCLING, PROACTIVE, REACTIVE, and MERGER algorithms for PMU traffic requirements.The components detect packet loss, reduce switch control traffic, create multicast backup trees, and optimize backup-tree construction.
  • Substation multicast schemes: Substation multicast schemes use OpenFlow fast-failover groups, multicast-tree calculation, and flow reconfiguration to improve fault tolerance and delivery.SMARTFlow prioritizes GOOSE and SV messages and restores communication after network failure.
  • Related routing schemes: The routing literature includes multicast and broadcast approaches based on RPL virtualization for different smart-grid traffic classes.OMC-RPL is reported to reduce message exchange through virtualization.

2) Multicast and Broadcast Routing Schemes for AMI Networks:

AMI routing schemes address growing smart-meter traffic, congestion, and resource constraints through SDN-based multicast and broadcast mechanisms. The surveyed discussion also highlights SDN benefits for extensibility, resilience, security, and self-healing, while identifying controller failure and broader multicast deployment as open issues.

  • AMI routing schemes: CoAP-SDN uses multicast and broadcast transmission of topology-information announcements for resource-constrained AMI devices.NS-3 simulations with IEC 61850 reported advantages over traditional SDN in control-message overhead, reliability, and QoS for large-scale networks.
  • Open issues: The survey identifies limited multicast coverage beyond V2G, PMU, and substation networks and calls for security-aware SDN-enabled IP multicast and additional AMI and cellular applications.
  • SDN routing benefits: SDN enables dynamic redundant routes, rerouting, route reservation, and network-wide routing decisions that can support self-healing smart-grid communication.
  • Open issues: A centralized SDN controller can become a single point of failure, motivating research on controller-failure handling and cross-layer SDN-enabled routing protocols.

1) AMI Networks:

The survey covers SDN-based security and privacy mechanisms for AMI and related smart-grid networks, while identifying controller, coordination, and service-protection gaps. It also reports that SDN-based AMI threat detection enables finer traffic control and dynamic protection, but SDN-based systems remain vulnerable to several attacks.

  • EPPI detects replay attacks and generates message authentication codes to preserve customer privacy in AMI networks.
  • SDN-based Snort gives administrators fine-grained traffic-flow control, supports dynamic forwarding-path redirection, and distributes threat detection across AMI networks.
  • SDN-based local controllers collect smart-meter data regionally and communicate it to control centers through fibre or power-line communication.
  • SDN-based security architectures address attacks across utility servers, communication networks, controllers, charging stations, devices, and vehicles.
  • SDN-based SGC remains vulnerable to denial-of-service, ARP-poisoning, and host-location-identification attacks, while distributed control introduces synchronization and consensus challenges.
  • Open research areas include darknet prevention, distributed SDN control, secure service provisioning, and security for billing, account management, installation, and customer management.

2) Link Failure Identification and Protection for SG Resilience:

The survey links SG resilience to reliable communication, controller protection, distributed renewable-energy coordination, and resilient SDN control mechanisms. It highlights unresolved challenges involving microgrid modes, in-band control, virtual power plants, network coding, and SDN security.

  • Link Failure Identification and Protection for SG Resilience: Reliable, fast, and robust communication is required for microgrid protection and correct functioning, especially across islanded and grid-connected modes.
  • Link Failure Identification and Protection for SG Resilience: Virtual power plants aggregate geographically distributed renewable resources as one logical entity, and SDN can support rapid assembly and reconfiguration.
  • Link Failure Identification and Protection for SG Resilience: OpenFlow uses a dedicated out-of-band link for controller-switch control traffic, while resilient restoration and path protection remain needed for SG communication.
  • Link Failure Identification and Protection for SG Resilience: Network coding can reduce SG data-collection time and improve reliability, but its coding coefficients, variants, and traffic impacts require further study.
  • Link Failure Identification and Protection for SG Resilience: Distributed SDN control can mitigate controller single-point failures, but replica synchronization creates control-channel overhead and state-consensus problems.
  • Link Failure Identification and Protection for SG Resilience: SDN-based SG security remains an open challenge because centralized control can fail, decentralization complicates controller intercommunication, and virtualized components require protection.

2) Routing Based on Content and Information Centric Networking in SDN-based SGC:

SDN-based SGC research spans content-centric networking, interoperability, virtualization, and integrated evaluation environments. The survey identifies substantial progress alongside unresolved standardization, security, simulation, and testbed challenges.

  • Routing Based on Content and Information Centric Networking in SDN-based SGC: SDN can support in-network caching, content-based routing, and query/response for information-centric networking in smart grids.The survey notes that ICN feasibility has been demonstrated on a real power distribution network in the Netherlands.
  • Routing Based on Content and Information Centric Networking in SDN-based SGC: Interoperability remains an open issue because smart-grid devices use different vendors, proprietary networks, and communication standards.The survey specifically identifies additional efforts needed for interoperability in SDN-based SGC so utilities can adopt SDN more easily.
  • Routing Based on Content and Information Centric Networking in SDN-based SGC: Evaluation studies predominantly use Mininet, OpenFlow, and NS-3, while East Bound and West Bound Interface research remains limited.These tools and interfaces are summarized in the survey’s evaluation overview.
  • Routing Based on Content and Information Centric Networking in SDN-based SGC: Integrated testbeds combining power-system, SDN, and smart-grid features are still needed for testing future protocols.Existing efforts include integrating Mininet, PowerWorld, and intrusion detection systems, plus a hardware-software federated simulation platform.
  • Routing Based on Content and Information Centric Networking in SDN-based SGC: Virtualization has been applied to substations, phasor measurement units, utility networks, power networks, and advanced metering infrastructure.Substation virtualization supports dynamic configuration and management, while simulations examined multiple infrastructure scenarios.
  • Routing Based on Content and Information Centric Networking in SDN-based SGC: The survey classifies SDN-based SGC routing schemes and reviews related architectures, case studies, security schemes, challenges, and future research directions.It presents these topics as components of a comprehensive survey of SDN-based smart-grid communication.
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