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

SPIDER: Fault Resilient SDN Pipeline with Recovery Delay Guarantees

When dealing with node or link failures in Software Defined Networking (SDN), the network capability to establish an alternative path depends on controller reachability and on the round trip times (RTTs) between controller and involved switches. Moreover, current SDN data plane abstractions for failure detection (e.g. OpenFlow "Fast-failover") do not allow programmers to tweak switches' detection mechanism, thus leaving SDN operators still relying on proprietary management interfaces (when available) to achieve guaranteed detection and recovery delays. We propose SPIDER, an OpenFlow-like pipeline design that provides i) a detection mechanism based on switches' periodic link probing and ii) fast reroute of traffic flows even in case of distant failures, regardless of controller availability. SPIDER can be implemented using stateful data plane abstractions such as OpenState or Open vSwitch, and it offers guaranteed short (i.e. ms) failure detection and recovery delays, with a configurable trade off between overhead and failover responsiveness. We present here the SPIDER pipeline design, behavioral model, and analysis on flow tables' memory impact. We also implemented and experimentally validated SPIDER using OpenState (an OpenFlow 1.3 extension for stateful packet processing), showing numerical results on its performance in terms of recovery latency and packet losses.Comment: 8 page

Software defined networking: meeting carrier grade requirements

Software Defined Networking is a networking paradigm which allows network operators to manage networking elements using software running on an external server. This is accomplished by a split in the architecture between the forwarding element and the control element. Two technologies which allow this split for packet networks are ForCES and Openflow. We present energy efficiency and resilience aspects of carrier grade networks which can be met by Openflow. We implement flow restoration and run extensive experiments in an emulated carrier grade network. We show that Openflow can restore traffic quite fast, but its dependency on a centralized controller means that it will be hard to achieve 50 ms restoration in large networks serving many flows. In order to achieve 50 ms recovery, protection will be required in carrier grade networks

In-band control, queuing, and failure recovery functionalities for openflow

In OpenFlow, a network as a whole can be controlled from one or more external entities (controllers) using in-band or out-of-band control networks. In this article, we propose in-band control, queuing, and failure recovery functionalities for OpenFlow. In addition, we report experimental studies and practical challenges for implementing these functionalities in existing software packages containing different versions of OpenFlow. The experimental results show that the in-band control functionality is suitable for all types of topologies. The results with the queuing functionality show that control traffic can be served with the highest priority in in-band networks and hence, data traffic cannot affect the communication between the controller and networking devices. The results with the failure recovery functionality show that traffic can be recovered from failures within 50 ms

ANCHOR: logically-centralized security for Software-Defined Networks

While the centralization of SDN brought advantages such as a faster pace of innovation, it also disrupted some of the natural defenses of traditional architectures against different threats. The literature on SDN has mostly been concerned with the functional side, despite some specific works concerning non-functional properties like 'security' or 'dependability'. Though addressing the latter in an ad-hoc, piecemeal way, may work, it will most likely lead to efficiency and effectiveness problems. We claim that the enforcement of non-functional properties as a pillar of SDN robustness calls for a systemic approach. As a general concept, we propose ANCHOR, a subsystem architecture that promotes the logical centralization of non-functional properties. To show the effectiveness of the concept, we focus on 'security' in this paper: we identify the current security gaps in SDNs and we populate the architecture middleware with the appropriate security mechanisms, in a global and consistent manner. Essential security mechanisms provided by anchor include reliable entropy and resilient pseudo-random generators, and protocols for secure registration and association of SDN devices. We claim and justify in the paper that centralizing such mechanisms is key for their effectiveness, by allowing us to: define and enforce global policies for those properties; reduce the complexity of controllers and forwarding devices; ensure higher levels of robustness for critical services; foster interoperability of the non-functional property enforcement mechanisms; and promote the security and resilience of the architecture itself. We discuss design and implementation aspects, and we prove and evaluate our algorithms and mechanisms, including the formalisation of the main protocols and the verification of their core security properties using the Tamarin prover.Comment: 42 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, 5 algorithms, 139 reference