A Deployable Containerized 5G Core Solution for Time Critical Communication in Smart Grid

Communication within substatation automation systems in a smart grid environment is often time-critical. The time required for exchanging information between intelligent devices should be within a few milliseconds. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61850 standard has proposed the Generic Object Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) protocol to achieve this goal. However the transmission of GOOSE messages is often limited to a small Local Area Network (LAN). In this demo we demonstrate the feasibility of using 5G for GOOSE-based time critical communication in a large-scale smart-grid environment and present a deployable 5G core solution using container-based virtualization technology. The radio part of the demo is emulated. The demo also shows that the delay introduced by the core network is in the order of sub milliseconds while the one-way delay without a real radio access network is less than 1 ms which is well below the total delay budget for GOOSE.