State Grid Qingdao, China Telecom, and Huawei Co-awarded "Best Innovative Commercial Case in 5G Automation Award"
[Madrid, Spain, April 26, 2020] At the third Network Automation Congress hosted online by Layer123, State Grid Qingdao Power Supply Company, China Telecom Research Institute, China Telecom Qingdao Branch, and Huawei were co-awarded the "Best Innovative Commercial Case in 5G Automation Award" for a joint Smart Grid project powered by 5G SA slicing technology.
Human history has shown repeatedly that the consolidation between new energy and communications technologies was a decisive driving force behind every industrial revolution that has reshaped our industry and economic landscape. The Energy Internet, powered by artificial intelligence, big data, and 5G, offers a new boost to the global economy. It also presents higher requirements on the access network of power grid communication terminals. Featuring large bandwidth, low latency, high reliability, and massive connections, 5G will become the obvious choice of communication network solution for Smart Grid by combining with a range of other technologies, such as edge computing and network slicing.
The State Grid Corporation of China, China Telecom, and Huawei were the first to propose 5G network slicing for power grids and the Energy Internet's three-level Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs model for network connectivity. Together, they initiated a national technology project for 5G network slicing and produced the industry's first report on the technical and commercial use of 5G network slicing for power grids. This allowed for mind-opening explorations in terms of the technical feasibility, commercial feasibility, use cases, and ecosystem development of the solution.
In the second half of 2019, State Grid Qingdao Power Supply Company, China Telecom Research Institute, China Telecom Qingdao Branch, Huawei, joining hands with upstream as well as downstream partners along the industry supply chain, successfully built China's largest 5G-powered Smart Grid pilot network in Qingdao. This pilot network is underpinned by Huawei's end-to-end 5G SA network and uses Huawei's cutting-edge, fully automated, multi-dimensional, dynamic 5G network slicing solution. Combining the ubiquitous connectivity and high-performance heterogeneous computing capacities delivered by Huawei 5G MEC solution, this solution offers a differentiated and deterministic networking capability for power grid applications, with faster speed and finer grained control. It is also the first of its kind to pass verification tests on intelligent distributed feeder automation, differential protection, and power distribution situation awareness enabled by 5G SA-based network slicing. Additionally, the project was used in protecting electricity security for the Qingdao Multinationals Summit 2019, a congregation of leaders from multinational corporations all over the world.
The success of this 5G SA slicing-based Smart Grid project is expected to advance the commercialization of 5G SA worldwide, as it has become a shining example for all industries seeking to leverage the power of 5G. In the future, this pilot project will further expand to fully explore the possibility of using 5G network slicing to run typical power grid applications, covering a wide range of services, including latency and bandwidth SLAs, secure isolation, lifecycle management, load balancing.
Hosted by Layer123, Network Automation Congress is an event that focuses on network automation, virtualization, and intelligence, and 2020 is the third year this conference has been held. The Network Automation Awards recognize organizations and projects that have made significant contributions to network automation and transformation, covering technological advances, open innovation, and business leadership in 5G innovation, SD-WAN, and other related fields.