5G Communication Infrastructure for Smart Grids: A Protection Use Case

A smart grid is an advanced electricity network enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT), Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and advanced grid technologies. 5G and beyond networks are expected to serve as the communication infrastructure of smart grids, providing intelligence, virtualization, and connectivity for millions of devices. This paper investigates the potential of 5G communication infrastructure for smart grids, specifically in the protection of smart grids. We evaluate the communication performance of 5G Standalone (SA) and Non-Standalone (NSA) in a protection scenario, where a User Equipment (UE) acting as an Intelligent Electronic Device (IED) simulates Routable Generic Object Oriented Substation Events (R-GOOSE) and Routable Sampled Values (R-SV) packets and transmits them over the 5G network. We tested the 5G network latency, packet loss, and jitter to evaluate its performance. By visualizing and computing the R-GOOSE and R-SV traffic it is observed that the latency of the majority of packets was 12-15 ms in SA and 20-45 ms in NSA.