ETArch-SG - A SDN-based Architecture to Support the Communication Requirements of Future Smart Grids

The future use of smart grid scenarios with massive amounts of data poses stringent requirements to the communication protocols. IEC 61850, the standard regarding communication within power systems, defines the minimum requirements by the technology supporting smart grids. Considering the new scenarios and their requirements, support to multicast communication can fulfill the time constraints. Current networking technologies based on the TCP/IP architecture have limitations to support multicast inside the network. Based on the Entity Title Architecture (ETArch), an SDN based network architecture, capable of satisfying requirements such as multicast, this work proposes ETArch-SG to support future smart grid communication requirements. By using an experimental approach, ETArch-SG was compared to the current TCP/IP architecture. Our results demonstrate that ETArch-SG can configure IED with lower latencies and communicate PMUs with better performance when compared to IP Multicast, reaching the IEC 61850 time constraints.