Dissertation on Software-Defined Networking for Energy Systems successfully completed

The CNI team is happy to announce that Nils Dorsch has successfully defended his dissertation on October 2, 2018. The dissertation titled "Software-Defined Networking (SDN) for Real-Time Capable, Reliable and Cost-Efficient Smart Grid Communication Infrastructures" has proposed and investigated innovative concepts for communication networks suitable for the so-called Smart Grid. The work has been carried out within the interdisciplinary DFG-funded research group 1511 on "Control and protection systems for the future energy system". Dr. Dorsch has proposed a dedicated SDN interface which enables energy system operators to control the underlying communication system through a so-called north-bound interface. These extension of the Floodlight SDN controller originally developed at Stanford University have been also made available as open source. As a unique solution approach, Nils Dorsch has integrated the Network Calculus method into the real-time SDN controller to ensure that the maximum delay bounds required by the energy system are met. The work of Nils Dorsch has attracted considerable attention: a first paper describing the overall system concept has been cited over 50 times since its publication in 2014 at the IEEE SmartGridComm conference. An analysis of the economic impact of SDN-based networks has been recently published as journal article in NETNOMICS (Springer). Another journal article on "Enabling Hard Service Guarantees in Software-Defined Smart Grid Infrastructures" is accepted to appear in Computer Networks (Elsevier).