Achieving throughput fairness in smart grid using SDN-based flow aggregation and scheduling

Latest research in smart grid communications has advocated the aggregation of multiple traffic flows in order to achieve an improved throughput. While aggregation improves the overall throughput, the individual flows still suffer from unfair throughput performance. As a result, the enablers for time sensitive smart grid services such as load-shedding that require a timely report of data are the most affected. In this paper, we propose a novel SDN-based framework to provide fairness among smart-meters, through flow aggregation and scheduling. By exploring the SDN's flow-level manageability features, for the first time in this paper, we present an implementation-based architecture to perform effective aggregation-and-scheduling of traffic flows. The proposed framework ensures fairness (among the smart-meters), as well as improve the throughput performance. Our extensive experiment results validate the efficacy of our proposed framework.