Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

Software defined networks (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. SDN revolutionized the way the communication network managed previously. By segregating the control plane from the data plane, SDN helps the network operators to manage the network flexibly. Since smart grid heavily relies on communication networks, therefore, SDN has also paved its way into the smart grid. By applying SDN in SG systems, efficiency and resiliency can potentially be improved. SDN, with its programmability, protocol independence, and granularity features, can help the smart grid to integrate different SG standards and protocols, to cope with diverse communication systems, and to help SG to perform traffic flow orchestration and to meet specific SG quality of service requirements. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based smart grid. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDN-based smart grid. We then discuss SDNbased smart grid architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on multicasting and routing schemes for SDN-based smart grid. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDNbased smart grid. We furthermore presents challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based smart grid.