SDN-Based Quality of Service Networking for Wide Area Measurement System

Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) infrastructure is one of the most significant elements of the smart grid which measures, collects, and analyzes data in the power system. Fundamental components of the WAMS are Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), Phasor Data Concentrators (PDCs) and its relevant applications. The PDC collects data from several different PMUs, integrates data and sends it to the control center. In order to achieve a stable implementation of WAMS, the communication structure should be reliable and meets the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for various applications in the network. In this paper, we propose a novel WAMS communication infrastructure by utilizing the Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology, which can enhance the reliability of the corresponding networks. In the proposed model, in order to meet the applications QoS needs, the traffic flows are categorized into different class of services, and then by applying a QoS mechanism, along with a content-aware queuing algorithm, the maximum capacity for the critical traffic is obtained. This provides a low latency for critical WAMS applications. The proposed model has been implemented in the Mininet environment using the Ryu Controller. The implementation results indicate that the proposed infrastructure reduces end-to-end delay and packets loss and utilizes the network resources optimally.