SDN-enabled recovery for Smart Grid teleprotection applications in post-disaster scenarios

Abstract Maintaining Smart Grid communications is crucial for providing power services. This requires a resilient communication architecture that can instantly self-repair any failures in the communication links or routes. Emerging Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology provides excellent flexibilities that can be applied to critical power grid applications. In this paper, we consider the problem of link failures in inter-substation communications and provide self-recovery by relying on wireless links that can be the only viable means for communication after disasters. Specifically, we propose an autonomous framework, which can not only detect link failures, but also establish either a WiFi or LTE-based link among substations through SDN capabilities. To be able to effectively evaluate the performance of this proposed SDN-enabled framework, we developed it in Mininet emulator. Since Mininet does not support LTE connections, we proposed several unique extensions to Mininet by integrating it with ns- 3 simulator that supports the LTE/WiFi protocol stacks. We conducted extensive experiments by considering a teleprotection application using GOOSE to assess the recovery performance of the proposed framework. The results show that SDN-based framework can meet the deadlines for teleprotection on wireless links during the times of link failures in a reliable fashion.