Aggregation points planning for software-defined network based smart grid communications

Smart grid is characterized by a large number of smart meters (SMs) that exchange huge amounts of data with control center, where an effective communication network is required to guarantee reliable data transmission. In this paper, we introduce software defined network (SDN) technology to the smart grid, which decouples the control plane from the data plane so as to satisfy the communication requirements in the mart grid effectively. Aggregation points (APs) are employed in the data plane to process and forward data between SMs and control center. A general mathematical model is formulated to plan the APs, where we try to minimize the total deployment cost, including the opening expenditure of the APs, the connection cost between SMs and APs, and the connection cost between APs and control center. We present a 5-approximation algorithm to address the generated NP-hard problem, which yields performance-guaranteed solutions. Three representative scenarios are investigated to verity the efficiency of our proposal. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithm has great advantages over other heuristic ones.