Reliability provision in software defined power substations communication networks

Abstract

In past years, the growing complexity of the electrical system and the rise in the number of Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) have increased the data network management complexity in power substations. A pressing need to improve the reliability of such environments has pushed energy companies to increase the investment in the operation of their communication networks. This paper proposes to use the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm into the communication networks of power substations to implement novel redundancy techniques based on redundant multicast trees, in order to replace the traditional redundancy mechanisms in power substation communication networks resulting in capital and operational costs reduction. We apply pre-planned protection based on redundant trees and formulate an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model to provide redundant multicast trees in the network trying to minimize the number of used network links. Redundant trees transmit duplicate traffic under the same underlying LAN in isolation, to guarantee zero recovery time and improve the use of network resources. Simulation results show that our approach achieves the same performance as traditional redundancy mechanisms using half of the network resources (i.e., compared against the Parallel Redundancy Protocol, PRP).