  The IEC 61850 standard is being largely used in the Smart Grid (SG) context
mainly due to its ability to address communication, interoperability and
migration issues. IEC 61850 currently aims at internal substation
communication. Nevertheless, there is a demand to generalize its use for
distributed SG systems like Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) and Advanced
Monitoring Infrastructure (AMI) Communication which potentially involves
distributed substations or distributed SG components. IEC 61850- based systems
require constrained timing requirements for communication and the common
approach is to allocate static link bandwidth resources leading in some cases
to over dimensioning. This paper presents the Substation Cognitive
Communication Resource Management (IC2RM), that aims the management of
bandwidth allocation for IEC messages using a cognitive approach for its
provisioning and the SDN/OpenFlow for its deployment. By dynamically deploying
bandwidth for IEC messages, IC2RM optimizes links between SG substations and
systems and potentially reduces the operational costs (OPEX).
