Designing Neighborhood Area Networks of Smart Grid using Software Defined Networks

The electricity grids used in the modern world are behind the times which are unchanged for decades. The new architecture needs to be introduced to gain agile power infrastructure. The designing of new architecture presented in this research is an effort to provide reliability and efficiency to power grids making them smart. To design agile network architecture, a software-defined network is a promising solution that helps achieve a centralized controlled communication network for the smart grid to benefit it with increased flexibility. We demonstrate the concept by implementing our network design on mininet simulation. SDN-based NANs for smart grids are proved to be scalable and efficiently controlling NANs centrally. The comparison is made based on all the graphs plotted to understand the best network architecture suitable for the power industry to implement SDN-based NANs in smart grid.