Enabling Digital Grid for Industrial Revolution: Self-Healing Cyber Resilient Platform

Abstract

Driving digital grid development to provide sustainable, reliable and secure network systems requires deploying a variety of applications against any potential cyber attacks. Therefore, there is an urgent demand to accelerate the development of an intelligent Software-Defined Networking (SDN) platform that can address the tremendous challenges of data protection for digital resiliency. Modern grid technology tends to adopt distributed SDN controllers for further slicing power grid domain and protect the boundaries of electric data at network edges. To facilitate these techniques, this article proposes an intelligent secure SDN controller for supporting digital grid resiliency, considering management coordination capability, self-healing features and recovery of network traffic forwarding during service interruptions. A set of advanced features are employed in grid controllers to configure the network elements in response to possible disasters or link failures. In addition, various SDN topology scenarios are introduced for efficient coordination and configurations of network domains. Finally, to justify the potential advantages of an intelligent secure SDN system, a case study is presented to evaluate the requirements of secure digital modern grid networks and pave the path toward the next phase of industry revolution.