Transportation and Power Grid in Smart Cities

6 Software Defined Networking and Virtualization for Smart Grid

Hakki C. Cankaya

Fujitsu Network Communications, Richardson, TX

6.1 Introduction

The smart grids that connect smart homes and smart buildings have been built to collectively shape smart cities and will facilitate many new applications and services. The new and/or improved services and applications over smart‐grid infrastructure will include but not be limited to Internet access, video surveillance, power distribution automation, security, and many more that we have not even think about yet. All these new services and applications will shape smart cities and improve lives. They require collecting ambient intelligence, situation awareness, and frequent and reliable communication between devices and distributed control centers (Rehmani, 2015). Machine‐to‐machine communication and IoT (Internet of Things) will be utilized regularly, and large volume of data (big data) that have been collected will have to be stored in the cloud and analyzed to make actionable decisions. Data centers and public and/or private clouds have been becoming parts of the utilities and energy sector IT infrastructure already. Security and privacy of the data and vulnerability of this complex and heterogeneous communication system are the main concerns for some time now, and there have been discussions on how to address them. Repeating attacks into networks of such systems are inevitable; however, correlating these individual attacks ...