A Simulation Study on Smart Grid Resilience under Software-Defined Networking Controller Failures

Abstract

Riding on the success of SDN for enterprise and data center networks, recently researchers have shown much interest in applying SDN for critical infrastructures. A key concern, however, is the vulnerability of the SDN controller as a single point of failure. In this paper, we develop a cyberphysical simulation platform that interconnects Mininet (an SDN emulator), hardware SDN switches, and PowerWorld (a high-fidelity, industry-strength power grid simulator). We report initial experiments on how a number of representative controller faults may impact the delay of smart grid communications. We further evaluate how this delay may affect the performance of the underlying physical system, namely automatic gain control (AGC) as a fundamental closed-loop control that regulates the grid frequency to a critical nominal value. Our results show that when the fault-induced delay reaches seconds (e.g., more than four seconds in some of our experiments), degradation of the AGC becomes evident. Particularly, the AGC is most vulnerable when it is in a transient following say step changes in loading, because the significant state fluctuations will exacerbate the effects of using a stale system state in the control.

Software Defined Networks-Based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

“…Content may change prior to final publication. [24] (2018), [99], [101], [103], [104] (2017), [100], [102], [105], [106] (2016), [73], [98]…”

“…The dropped packets may have very critical impact on the SG as they may contain control traffic or commands given by the SDN controller. Thus, the time critical communication in SG may suffer [105].…”

“…In an effort to deal SDN controller failures and its impact on SG, Ghosh et al [105] presented a detailed study. More precisely, the authors focused on the impact of SDN controller failure of automatic gain control (AGC) of SG communication system.…”

An SDN-IoT − Based Framework for Future Smart Cities

“…A secure SDN based framework has been proposed for content centric application has been devised by Ghosh et al In [38], secure multi-path routing protocol has been designed which significantly improves the network performance.This work is pretty much feasible to incorporate for futuristic smart cities. Ghosh et al, proposed a SDN based secure framework for smart energy delivery system [39]or smart cities, which addressed a number of fault injections and controller failure scenarios as well. In [40], Alnumay et al, designed and developed a trust-based system for securing IoT applications using a predictive model of ARMA/GARCH (1,1), whcih significantly improve network functionalities in smart city scenarios.…”