Dependability of Smart Distribution Grid Protection Using 5G

The future trends for smart distribution grids will be increasingly characterized by more use of advanced communication technologies, like the function virtualization. The smart grid can benefit from virtualization and emerging standard ICT technologies such as 5G, to become more cost effective. However, stringent performance requirements must be met and higher reliability, robustness, flexibility and scalability must be provided. This paper discusses the usage of virtualzation concepts in 5G technology for protection function/application in distribution grid. A 5G based architecture using an edge computing infrastructure to hosting the control and protection applications is proposed. A stochastic activity network based model is used to analyze and compare the reliability of the proposed 5G based architecture with a functionally identical Ethernet based IEC 61850 architecture. The 5G architecture seems to result in a significant gain in availability provided that redundancy on the radio links is used to compensate the loss due to random fading processes.