ICT Requirements and Recent Developments

Abstract Challenged by the transition towards renewable energy generation, new Smart Grid concepts require reliable wide area monitoring, protection, and control. Adequate information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructures need to provide high (temporal and spatial) availability, robustness against network failures and interfering background traffic, real-time capability, and security against cyber-attacks. While existing ICT network infrastructures can only partially fulfill challenging Smart Grid requirements, recent developments in the context of 5G networks and the Internet of Things technologies address open issues, such as the provisioning of strict service guarantees in terms of availability, reliability, and real-time capability. Building on software-defined networking and network function virtualization, 5G-based network slicing and edge computing form the basis for high performance ICT infrastructures for Smart Grids.