PhD thesis on Software-Defined Networking for Smart Grids and 5G sucessfully completed

The CNI team is happy to announce that Dr.-Ing. Fabian Kurtz has successfully defended his PhD thesis. on "Design and Performance Evaluation of Adaptive Critical Infrastructure Communications based on Software-Defined Networking" and congratulates him wholeheartedly.

Critical infrastructures, such as energy or water supply, but also transport routes, require highly reliable communication networks that are robust and resilient, especially when parts of the infrastructure fail in crisis situations or reconfigurations involving high communication costs become necessary. In the past, vertical solutions were often preferred, i.e. independently operated networks were set up for individual branches of industry in order to rule out interactions and resource bottlenecks. With the availability of Software-Defined Networks (SDN) it has become possible to use communication resources much more efficiently on the basis of a standardized and common infrastructure and at the same time to serve the specific requirements of individual fields of application decoupled from each other. In his dissertation, Dr.-Ing. Fabian Kurtz presents solution for the design and detailed analysis of corresponding methods that use and concretely implement the possibilities of software-defined networks. The results provide valuable contributions for the future use of software-defined networks for critical infrastructures and contributes by objective and comprehensible analyses to increase the acceptance of these innovative approaches by potential users, e.g. in the energy industry for the use in smart grids.