5G Network Slicing as an Enabler for Smart Distribution Grid Operations

Abstract

The power distribution grid has to undergo substantial modifications in order to meet the future electricity needs. The increased flexibility in power consumption, local production and storage insist on smarter supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) operations which can restrain dynamic conditions of the power distribution grid. Furthermore, the grid connected and islanded operations of microgrids imply that advanced protection and control schemes are of utmost importance. This calls for high reliable, secure and low-latency communication services. 5G can be foreseen as a strong candidate to provide such services. Network slicing is a new paradigm in 5G which is intended to benefit many industries by slicing one physical network infrastructure into many virtual end-to-end networks. This paper proposes a scalable communication architecture which can provide customized communication services according to the diverse performance requirements demanded by the future smart distribution grid. It recommends the use of 5G network slicing to provide for the necessary communication services, proposing a network slice template to comprehend with respective requirements.