Infinite Queue Management via Cascade Control for Industrial Routers in Smart Grid IP Networks

Abstract

Smart grid applications experience an extremely wide range of communication delay. Data flows of those applications are normally aggregated at industrial network routers in substations, form infinite (long) queues termed bufferbloat issue, and might damage the operation of transmission control protocol. The default queue management scheme, DropTail, in such routers just drops packets if queue is full while the others in literature are mostly based on one-loop feedback control where an optimal point of performance between queue length and drop rate is limited. In this paper, we study the problem of managing a long queue of industrial router at substation under heterogeneous smart grid networks. Specifically, we propose an enqueue-dequeue dropping cascade control using a two-loop design method to control both window size and queue length. Moreover, our proposal can be easily implemented into router firmware with provided discrete expressions. Finally, our simulation results are presented to validate the possible benefits that can be gained from cascade control and compare the existing queue management methods as well.