Systems and methods for integrating ultra-fast programmable networks in microgrid are disclosed to provide flexible and easy-to-manage communication solutions, thus enabling resilient microgrid operations in face of various cyber and physical disturbances. The system is configured to establish a novel software-defined networking (SDN) based communication architecture which abstracts the network infrastructure from the upper-level applications to significantly expedite the development of microgrid applications, develop three functions of the SDN controller for microgrid emergency operations, including time delay guarantee, failover reconfiguration and rate limit and create a hardware-in-the-loop cyber-physical platform for evaluating and validating the performance of the presented architecture and control techniques.