Mobile Networks for Smart Grid Revisited

For a distributed system like the power grid, the requirements on fast and reliable communications are increasing due to build out of intermittent renewable energy sources, reduced inertia in the power production and high power loads. Mobile networks have the potential of reducing investment and maintenance cost for smart grids since no dedicated communication network is needed. However, most deployments still rely on other communication technologies. In this paper we investigate the challenges of using the existing 4G mobile networks based on measurement data and notice that the average performance is typically at an acceptable level, but the latencies of higher reliability percentiles are very high. This makes control applications with high reliability requirements problematic over unmanaged networks, such as the Internet or public mobile networks. Mobile networks are complex systems with large number of mechanisms that may be used to improve the reliability and latency of all the steps of the end-to-end communication path. In critical events, such as power outage, a storm of alarms from different sensors will be triggered. In this paper we analyze how short response times can be provided to smart grid devices also at such events. This shows how new features have made mobile networks more suitable for smart grid communication in the evolution from the 4th to the 5th generation of network technology.