KSEF RDE: A Software-Defined Networking Framework for Providing Critical Communication Services in Smart Grid

Smart Grid will revolutionize national power grid systems by improving the reliability and resilience, enabling demand response and accommodating alternative energy resources. Communications and information technologies are one of the key enabling components of future smart grid by providing reliable and efficient two-way communication capabilities. A Smart Grid system involves many applications, such as power grid state estimation and control, demand response, distribution automation, distributed generation and microgrids. They will generate a large volume of data traffic over the grid with different quality of service (QoS) requirements. Some are delay sensitive while others are bandwidth sensitive. Some applications may generate traffic that can be served by best-effort communications. Current networks can meet the QoS requirements when all flows make reservations. However, they are not suitable to handle the hybrid case with both real-time and best-effort traffic. In this research, we propose a software-defined networking (SDN) framework that will address the QoS issue in the Smart Grid systems. We will explore a QoS provisioning mechanism based on per-class/priority-queuing with feedback control by taking advantage of the mechanisms provided by the OpenFlow controller in SDN. The novelty of the approach is that the clue of impending congestion from the network will be used as a notification for applications to reschedule the sending time or perform more aggressive aggregation. We will implement and evaluate the proposed framework using the GENI testbed and test it in a practical setting. This study will advance the state-of-the-art of using software-defined networking to address the quality of service issue in network communications and improve the reliability and efficiency of the power grid systems.