THANOS: Teleprotection Holistic Application for ONOS Controller

Supervisory and control systems should provide reliable and autonomic functionalities for real-time communication. The new generation of communication-based energy applications relies on networks to exchange messages between devices in the substation. Therefore, the underlying communication network must satisfy strict temporal constraints imposed by these complex electrical power systems. In this work, we present a practical description of THANOS: an SDN-based application built on top of ONOS that facilitates discovery, communication configuration, and monitoring of intelligent devices in IEC 61850 compliant substations. THANOS enables automatic configuration of IEC 61850 protocols with failure recovery support. THANOS also supports multiple backup instances to improve control resiliency. We first present an overview of THANOS architecture. Then, we highlight the challenges and lessons learned during the development of THANOS. Finally, we present experiments that evaluate THANOS' functionalities.