5G-Enabled Smart City Infrastructure for Critical Power and Utility Management

Abstract

The high rate of the development of the fifth-generation (5G) wireless network offers the revolutionary possibilities of the smart city implementation, especially in the critical power and utility management systems. This essay explores the architectures, communication schemes and implementation plans related to 5G-enabling smart city infrastructure with a particular focus on electricity grids, water distribution systems, and gas utility networks. Our analysis covers the main 5G characteristics ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC), massive machine-type communication (mMTC), and enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), and how they can be used to the monitoring of real-time, fault detection, demand response, and grid automation. An analysis between the current communication paradigms (4G LTE, ZigBee, LoRaWAN, and WiSUN) and 5G is done based on latency, bandwidth, scalability, and reliability. The security issues, such as spoofing, jamming, and man-in-the-middle attacks, are addressed, as well as mitigation solutions that utilize network slicing, edge computing, and blockchain-based access control. To confirm theoretical propositions, case studies of pilot deployments in South Korea, the UAE, and India are included. The results prove that 5G has a great positive impact on utility operational efficiency up to 40 percent, decrease of outage detection time to less than 10 milliseconds and facilitating the seamless integration of distributed energy resources (DERs). The article adds the perspective of a holistic approach to the synergistic relationship between 5G connectivity and smart utility management to provide a guideline when adopting large scale deployments in the city in the future.