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Smart grids are recognized as the next-generation power grid that uses digital information and communications technology to create an advanced, automated, and efficient energy network among a wealth of electronic appliances, meters, and energy producing and distributing devices. As more complex and distributed interactions among these different components are envisioned, an open, scalable, and manageable framework is needed to support the communication and computing needs. This paper proposes an innovative method to derive scalable information infrastructure for smart grids. The framework well aligns with the emerging micro-grid operational model of the smart grid. A prototype framework is being developed consisting of CloudLab [1], GENI [2] wired and wireless networks, and realtime power system platform at the RTPIS Lab [3].

Software-defined networking (SDN) is envisioned to provide a centralized interface to programmatically manage networking elements. However, despite its conceptual simplicity, current switch and SDN architectures have poor performance with little support to innovate and test novel SDN applications. We propose an application extensibility framework that allows researchers to build new SDN applications without requiring modification to the OpenFlow-based plumbing available today. We also employ both hardware and software packet processing capabilities of switching elements by offloading intensive perpacket processing onto the switch processing pipeline using dynamically loadable packet processing modules (PPMs). Our architecture thus allows flexibility in the type of applications alongside high switching performance. We believe that our architecture will unleash the potential of SDN by inspiring the SDN "killer app". We evaluate our framework using an encryption middlebox application and show a two orders-ofmagnitude improvement over an implementation using the current SDN architecture when using hardware offload blocks.