Light-Weighted Security Signaling Scheme in OpenFlow Controlled Optical Network for Energy Internet

The communication security issue brought by Energy Internet is of great importance and should not be ignored in backbone optical networks which is undergoing the evolution toward software defined networks (SDN). With the aim to solve this problem, this paper conducts deep analysis into the security challenge of OpenFlow based optical networks under energy internet environment and proposes a so-called lightweight security signaling scheme of OpenFlow controlled optical networks for Energy Internet. The proposed scheme makes full advantage of current OpenFlow protocol with some necessary extensions and security improvement, by combining digital signatures and message feedback with efficient PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) in signaling procedure of OpenFlow interaction. Thus, this light-weighted security signaling procedure is also designed in detail to make sure the end-to-end trusted service connection. Simulation results show that this proposed approach can greatly improve the security level of large-scale optical network for Energy Internet services with better performance in term of connection success rate performance.