Fast Path Recovery for Single Link Failure in SDN-Enabled Wide Area Measurement System

In the wide area measurement system (WAMS), the end-to-end transmission delay between the phasor measurement unit (PMU) and phasor data concentrator (PDC) is strictly constrained for real-time monitoring and protection applications. When a communication link failure happens, fast path recovery is required to reduce the impact of measurement losses. In this work, the promising software-defined network (SDN) technique is leveraged to compute the re-routing path in a global view upon a single link failure. More specifically, a hybrid fast path recovery algorithm (HFPR-A) is proposed based on the principle of simplicity: in some cases, the shortest path or approximate shortest path between PMU and PDC can be recovered by adding only one edge to the original forwarding tree; while in the other cases, the shortest paths can be recovered with lower computational complexity than the traditional Dijkstra’s algorithm. The proposed HFPR-A is implemented on the Ryu + Mininet testbed, and the simulation results on different IEEE benchmark test power systems show that the proposed HFPR-A could find shorter re-routing paths than the existing methods with a low-enough response time.