Opportunities for Software-Defined Networking in Smart Grid

The large-scale, heterogeneous, and distributed nature of the Smart Grid poses many challenges to be overcome from communication networking to autonomous control and management. The underlying infrastructure of Smart Grid must be efficient and reliable in transmitting large amounts of real-time data, scalable and flexible in aggregating resources, and secured and convenient in providing management interfaces to upper layer application systems. Meanwhile, the recent rapidly developing technology of Software Defined Networking (SDN) is perceived to have tremendous potential for utilization by the underlying infrastructure. By abstracting control functionalities from underlying packet forwarding hardware to an external software controller, SDN offers a high degree of flexibility for implementing novel networking solutions to improve performances of distributed systems in large, complex network environments such as Smart Grid. In this paper, three potential use cases are presented to examine the opportunities for SDN technology in Smart Grid.