5G for IEC 61850 Smart Grid Communications: Mapping Technology Enablers and Network Slicing Performance Insights

The growing penetration of renewables and prosumagers in the 2030s will require deeper monitoring and control in medium- and low-voltage grids. Wireless technologies, particularly 5G, offer possibilities for cost-effective, flexible, and scalable connectivity in grid automation. Power system communication is highly heterogeneous, involving diverse traffic types with varying latency and reliability requirements. Prior research on 5G technology enablers, such as carrier aggregation, dual connectivity, and network slicing (NS), has focused on other verticals and relied mainly on simulations, leaving a gap in experimental validation for grid protection and automation under realistic conditions. This paper maps 5G technology enablers to IEC 61850 traffic types and evaluates their performance in commercial 5G networks for line differential protection and virtualised fault passage indication. Results show that NS improves reliability compared to traffic prioritisation, but does not yet meet ultra-low latency requirements for line differential protection. Minimum latency for mission-critical protection traffic reaches approximately 11 ms, and round-trip times are 32% lower than prior works. These findings provide the first end-to-end empirical evidence of 5G technology enabler deployment for smart grid applications and offer practical guidance for future implementations.