A lightweight CoAP-based software defined networking for resource constrained AMI devices

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) network is the capillary communication network for smart grid that does not only provide the data collection from each household but also delivers configuration requests from intelligent energy services. However, the smart grid network challenges like heterogeneity, large-scale, and distributed operation must be solved for reliable and stable smart grid services. Software defined networking (SDN) can help improving the network scalability and consistency issues by separating control and data planes, but it needs to be optimized for resource-constrained AMI devices. To solve this problem, we suggest a new design for an SDN controller-client system based on the constrained application protocol (CoAP). The proposed system is completed with a message exchange procedure, a network policy execution and a simplified routing strategy. The experiment and simulation results of CoAP based SDN and its software defined routing application outperforms traditional SDN and routing protocols in terms of control message overhead, reliability, and QoS in large-scale AMI environment.