Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte

A critical analysis of research potential, challenges and future directives in industrial wireless sensor networks

In recent years, Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) have emerged as an important research theme with applications spanning a wide range of industries including automation, monitoring, process control, feedback systems and automotive. Wide scope of IWSNs applications ranging from small production units, large oil and gas industries to nuclear fission control, enables a fast-paced research in this field. Though IWSNs offer advantages of low cost, flexibility, scalability, self-healing, easy deployment and reformation, yet they pose certain limitations on available potential and introduce challenges on multiple fronts due to their susceptibility to highly complex and uncertain industrial environments. In this paper a detailed discussion on design objectives, challenges and solutions, for IWSNs, are presented. A careful evaluation of industrial systems, deadlines and possible hazards in industrial atmosphere are discussed. The paper also presents a thorough review of the existing standards and industrial protocols and gives a critical evaluation of potential of these standards and protocols along with a detailed discussion on available hardware platforms, specific industrial energy harvesting techniques and their capabilities. The paper lists main service providers for IWSNs solutions and gives insight of future trends and research gaps in the field of IWSNs

JiTS: Just-in-Time Scheduling for Real-Time Sensor Data Dissemination

We consider the problem of real-time data dissemination in wireless sensor networks, in which data are associated with deadlines and it is desired for data to reach the sink(s) by their deadlines. To this end, existing real-time data dissemination work have developed packet scheduling schemes that prioritize packets according to their deadlines. In this paper, we first demonstrate that not only the scheduling discipline but also the routing protocol has a significant impact on the success of real-time sensor data dissemination. We show that the shortest path routing using the minimum number of hops leads to considerably better performance than Geographical Forwarding, which has often been used in existing real-time data dissemination work. We also observe that packet prioritization by itself is not enough for real-time data dissemination, since many high priority packets may simultaneously contend for network resources, deteriorating the network performance. Instead, real-time packets could be judiciously delayed to avoid severe contention as long as their deadlines can be met. Based on this observation, we propose a Just-in-Time Scheduling (JiTS) algorithm for scheduling data transmissions to alleviate the shortcomings of the existing solutions. We explore several policies for non-uniformly delaying data at different intermediate nodes to account for the higher expected contention as the packet gets closer to the sink(s). By an extensive simulation study, we demonstrate that JiTS can significantly improve the deadline miss ratio and packet drop ratio compared to existing approaches in various situations. Notably, JiTS improves the performance requiring neither lower layer support nor synchronization among the sensor nodes

A Novel QoS provisioning Scheme for OBS networks

This paper presents Classified Cloning, a novel QoS provisioning mechanism for OBS networks carrying real-time applications (such as video on demand, Voice over IP, online gaming and Grid computing). It provides such applications with a minimum loss rate while minimizing end-to-end delay and jitter. ns-2 has been used as the simulation tool, with new OBS modules having been developed for performance evaluation purposes. Ingress node performance has been investigated, as well as the overall performance of the suggested scheme. The results obtained showed that new scheme has superior performance to classical cloning. In particular, QoS provisioning offers a guaranteed burst loss rate, delay and expected value of jitter, unlike existing proposals for QoS implementation in OBS which use the burst offset time to provide such differentiation. Indeed, classical schemes increase both end-to-end delay and jitter. It is shown that the burst loss rate is reduced by 50% reduced over classical cloning

Multiservice QoS-Enabled MAC for Optical Burst Switching

The emergence of a broad range of network-driven applications (e.g., multimedia, online gaming) brings in the need for a network environment able to provide multiservice capabilities with diverse quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. In this paper, a medium access control protocol is proposed to support multiple services and QoS levels in optical burst-switched mesh networks without wavelength conversion. The protocol provides two different access mechanisms, queue-arbitrated and prearbitrated for connectionless and connection-oriented burst transport, respectively. It has been evaluated through extensive simulations and its simplistic form makes it very promising for implementation and deployment. Results indicate that the protocol can clearly provide a relative quality differentiation for connectionless traffic and guarantee null (or negligible, and thus acceptable) burst loss probability for a wide range of network (or offered) load while ensuring low access delay for the higher-priority traffic. Furthermore, in the multiservice scenario mixing connectionless and connection-oriented burst transmissions, three different prearbitrated slot scheduling algorithms are evaluated, each one providing a different performance in terms of connection blocking probability. The overall results demonstrate the suitability of this architecture for future integrated multiservice optical networks

State-of-the-art in Power Line Communications: from the Applications to the Medium

In recent decades, power line communication has attracted considerable attention from the research community and industry, as well as from regulatory and standardization bodies. In this article we provide an overview of both narrowband and broadband systems, covering potential applications, regulatory and standardization efforts and recent research advancements in channel characterization, physical layer performance, medium access and higher layer specifications and evaluations. We also identify areas of current and further study that will enable the continued success of power line communication technology.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. Special Issue on Power Line Communications and its Integration with the Networking Ecosystem. 201