Software defined power substations: An architecture for network communications and its control plane

Communications network management in power substations, has been transformed into an area that, in recent years, has captured the attention of researchers and device manufacturers. Particularly, various studies have proposed the possibility of incorporating technology enablers such as Software Defined Networking (SDN), in order to automate processes and improve the management and operation of the communications network. This paper proposes a novel architecture to model the communications network of power substations (S3N - Smart Solution for Substation Networks). In particular, a functionalities-based network control plane enabled by SDN and virtualization technologies is introduced.