Trends and Potentials of the Smart Grid Infrastructure: From ICT Sub-System to SDN-Enabled Smart Grid Architecture

Context and situational awareness are key features and trends of the smart grid and enable adaptable, flexible and extendable smart grid services. However, the traditional hardware-dependent communication infrastructure is not designed to identify the flow and context of data, and it focuses only on packet forwarding using a pre-defined network configuration profile. Thus, the current network infrastructure may not dynamically adapt the various business models and services of the smart grid system. To solve this problem, software-defined networking (SDN) is being considered in the smart grid, but the design, architecture and system model need to be optimized for the smart grid environment. In this paper, we investigate the state-of-the-art smart grid information subsystem, communication infrastructure and its emerging trends and potentials, called an SDN-enabled smart grid. We present an abstract business model, candidate SDN applications and common architecture of the SDN-enabled smart grid. Further, we compare recent studies into the SDN-enabled smart grid depending on its service functionalities, and we describe further challenges of the SDN-enabled smart grid network infrastructure.