A real-time cyber-physical testbed to assess protection system traffic over 5G networks

The fifth-generation (5G) mobile network promises to offer low latency services. Hence, there is interest in assessing various power distribution grid applications that can be deployed with a 5G infrastructure. This paper presents a smart grid cyber-physical testbed for protection systems. It consists of power system applications deployed on OPAL-RT, a real-time platform, and a 5G communication network modeled in ns-3. The testbed is used to assess the performance of a power system protection application (Permissive Underreaching Transfer Trip (PUTT) protection scheme) deployed over a 5G communication network. The proposed approach enables real-time protection traffic to be analyzed in an emulated 5G network and gives insights into how such a testbed can be used to assess the performance of protection traffic in 5G networks and beyond.