ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the use of software-defined networking (SDN) for various applications in the smart grid. It explains how SDN can be utilized in the applications, describes potential security threats that can arise as a result of deploying SDN in these applications, and suggests solutions to alleviate the threats. The chapter explores the ample unique research challenges within an SDN-enabled smart grid infrastructure and provides some background on SDN. It examines how several smart grid applications can exploit SDN by summarizing the existing efforts and discusses the security issues with SDN and potential security threats related to smart grid-enabled SDN. The SDN-enabled networks become more flexible and accessible networks with software interfaces making it very convenient for network management. SDN can provide more fine-grained control on traffic compared to traditional networks. SDN enables innovation on the network and each transmission control protocol/Internet protocol layer might have an independent innovation.
