Sigre 2015. — 9 с.
Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc., USA, [email protected]Availability, reliability, and simplicity are major metrics in the world of teleprotection communications. Protection applications based on exchanging command signals once thrived in the realm of analog signal and dedicated point-to-point communications links. Due to the trend of combining all communications on an Ethernet network (a shared-bandwidth communications medium by design, illustrated in the relevant IEEE standards), protection signals are being published over a network that was never meant to offer message delivery deterministic enough—or deterministic at all—for mission-critical applications.
A new Ethernet packet transport technology, software-defined networking (SDN) and its open-source protocol incarnation, OpenFlow™, promises to revolutionize the ways that traffic engineers design, build, operate, and maintain critical networks. OpenFlow promises improved performance on Ethernet networks via granular control over Layers 1 to 4 of the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model. It also promises to give network engineers the ability to abstract teleprotection communications out of the Ethernet world and back into the realm of dedicated virtual circuits without sacrificing simplicity, flexibility, and reliability. OpenFlow-enabled Ethernet hardware further promises the ready availability of inexpensive, nonproprietary hardware that can be modeled and controlled like a software application programming interface (API) and the elimination of the need for most proprietary Ethernet management protocols.
This paper provides a description of the requirements for protection-class Ethernet networks (PCENs) and the benefits of using SDN technology over traditional networking.
