Survey and Comparison of SDN Controllers for Teleprotection and Control Power Systems

The advent of smart grid promotes the upgrade of substation automation technology, adding processing and communication capabilities to control and protection devices. Thereby, research on substation data communication networks is pressured to find new, efficient, and reliable ways to support such scenario. In particular, the IEC 61850 standard defines stringent temporal requirements for the power systems communication comprising teleprotection schemes. Given that the power grid is a critical infrastructure, availability is also a strong requirement. In that context, Software-Defined Network (SDN) may provide powerful tools to fulfill those requirements at acceptable costs. In this paper, we survey and compare several available SDN controllers and their applicability to the teleprotection scenario.