Reliable and flexible communications for power systems: Fault-tolerant multicast with SDN/OpenFlow

Abstract

Our work evaluates the use of software-defined networking (SDN) for reliable communication. Reliable communication has become an important topic in many areas, including energy communication networks or, more generally, automation control networks. Electrical grids are developing into smart grids, which depend heavily on reliability, robustness and optimized resource usage. On the other side, the separation of communication and network control proposed by SDN opens new possibilities for reliable and flexible networks. In this work, we show how OpenFlow, the leading SDN framework, could be used to solve the problem of robust multicast better than existing technologies used by substations. Our solution uses the fast-failover groups feature of OpenFlow to provide one-link fault tolerance with little packet loss and can provide routes that use resources efficiently and are less likely to fail. Robust shortest path routing and minimum spanning tree broadcast routing come as special cases. We also show how this solution can be extended to handle more link failures (even an arbitrary number of them) or to provide more efficient routes.