Abstract
5G network slicing is promising in prioritizing time-critical protection communication in wireless networks of smart grids. However, network slicing offered by telecommunication providers encompasses all smart grid applications, lacking granularity. Smart grid automation standards provide recommendations on prioritization of protection communication to improve reliability but only for wired connections. Therefore, this paper investigates hierarchical token bucket (HTB) traffic shaping and uplink (UL) bitrate adaptation of a live video stream for prioritizing protection communication within a 5G slice. An experimental setup combines controller-hardware-in-the-loop (CHIL) with a quality of service (QoS) measurement system for validation. The system under test consists of commercial 5G networks, intelligent electronic devices (IEDs), and merging units for validation with three smart grid applications: fault location, line differential, and intertrip protection. HTB traffic shaping improves protected faults by 47.57% in congested and 1.16% in non-congested scenarios. UL bitrate of the video stream adaptation by 2 Mbps increases protected faults by 3.69%. HTB traffic shaping even improves prioritization with a wired connection without introducing additional delays. HTB traffic shaping must be deployed in routers to maintain good QoS for critical applications. Collaboration between utilities and telecommunication providers is essential to effectively deploy 5G network slicing on smart grids.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e12309 |
| Journal | Journal of Engineering |
| Volume | 2023 |
| Issue number | 9 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 13 Sept 2023 |
| MoE publication type | A1 Journal article-refereed |
Funding
This work was partly supported by the Finnish public funding agency for research, Business Finland, under the projects 5GVIIMA (6392/31/2018) and IFORGE (7263/31/2021). The projects are a part of the 5G Test Network Finland (5GTNF) ecosystem.