Distributed Software-Defined Network Architecture for Smart Grid Resilience to Denial-of-Service Attacks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a distributed three-controller SDN architecture for smart grid resilience, benchmarking its performance against other techniques and demonstrating significant improvements in throughput and latency during DoS attacks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed three-controller SDN architecture for smart grids and provides a comprehensive benchmarking analysis against existing methods.

Findings

Tenfold increase in throughput compared to single SDN controller

Over 20% reduction in latency during DoS scenarios

Approximately 11% increase in throughput under attack conditions

Abstract

An important challenge for smart grid security is designing a secure and robust smart grid communications architecture to protect against cyber-threats, such as Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, that can adversely impact the operation of the power grid. Researchers have proposed using Software Defined Network frameworks to enhance cybersecurity of the smart grid, but there is a lack of benchmarking and comparative analyses among the many techniques. In this work, a distributed three-controller software-defined networking (D3-SDN) architecture, benchmarking and comparative analysis with other techniques is presented. The selected distributed flat SDN architecture divides the network horizontally into multiple areas or clusters, where each cluster is handled by a single Open Network Operating System (ONOS) controller. A case study using the IEEE 118-bus system is provided to compare the performance of the presented ONOS-managed D3-SDN, against the POX controller. In addition, the proposed architecture outperforms a single SDN controller framework by a tenfold increase in throughput; a reduction in latency of $>20\%$; and an increase in throughput of approximately $11\%$ during the DoS attack scenarios.