SAMbA: A Session Aware Multicast based Architecture for cost-efficient Smart Grid applications

The Smart Grid (SG) is one of the most ultimate topics within the energy communities. It refers to the modernized electric grid, including innovative Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to support enhanced power management, protection, security, reliability, and improved costumer choice. To that, SG systems depends on reliable and scalable networking solution to allow efficient communications amongst applications, as power monitoring, protection, demand response and advanced metering, and Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) that provide SG system measurements. However, the deployment of SG applications is complex and very challenging, given the missing of standards and convergent technologies to enable the jointly operation of the underlying heterogeneous systems. SG applications must implement different interfaces to intercommunicate with IEDs in their platforms, process-bus communication protocol, network technologies, and other, limiting the system scalability and time response. We propose the Session Aware Multicast based Architecture (SAMbA) to decouple the intercommunication amongst SG applications and multiple heterogeneous IEDs. SAMbA also leverages multihoming control to keep best connected sessions, and adopts multicast-based channels to achieve optimized communications, while hiding network aspects, as naming and addressing, of IEDs. Simulation results from scenarios under Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) application traffic show that the SAMbA architecture outperforms the typical communication scheme in terms of network performance aspects.