PRESS RELEASE: ZTE Corporation, China Mobile and NR Electric have jointly released the industry’s first end-to-end 5G TSN deterministic network at the PT/EXPO China 2021. Supporting grid services such as grid differential protection, the network accelerates the deployment of renewable energy sources such as solar energy and wind energy while empowering green grids.

The “climate action” launched by the United Nations aims to promote economic prosperity while protecting the planet. In the power field, greenhouse gas emissions from thermal power generation are huge, and efficient use of clean and renewable energy sources such as wind energy and solar energy is an effective means to achieve “emission peak, carbon neutrality”. However, wind energy and solar energy supply is not stable due to the factors like weather and locations, which brings challenges to the integration of renewable energy into the power grids.

To incorporate renewable energy into power grids more efficiently, networks with deterministic latency must be used for real-time monitoring and scheduling, to ensure secure and stable power grid operation. However, the traditional 5G networks adopt the Best Effort scheduling mechanism, so the latency and bandwidth cannot be controlled to meet the requirements.

The end-to-end 5G TSN deterministic network can effectively solve the network latency and jitter problems caused by traffic conflicts. Combined with the slicing technology and the technology of separating forwarding from control, the determinacy of the power grid is guaranteed fundamentally and the security and stability of the power grid is assured. Moreover, the network, adopting wireless congestion control and scheduling algorithms, intelligent scheduling data forwarding, and queue management in the core network, is able to greatly reduce 5G end-to-end latency.

In addition, the technologies such as wireless dual-link, end-to-end frame replication and elimination (FRER), as well as network dual-tunnel are utilized to meet the demanding requirements for  reliability of the power grid. And the industry’s first TSN hardware acceleration card provides real-time traffic identification and forwarding, traffic shaping, and high-precision clock synchronization, which ensures that, the time latency, jitter, and time synchronization can meet the synchronization requirements of the sampling data on the differential protection device.

5G TSN deterministic network, replacing optical fiber cables, allows flexible access to the last mile and significantly reduces the cost of communication network constructions. 5G TSN can be widely used in power service scenarios such as grid differential protection, power distribution automation, phasor measurement unit (PMU) and accurate grid load scheduling. While accelerating the deployment of new energy such as solar energy and wind energy, it achieves efficient coordination of various types of energy resources including wind, solar, water, thermal and storage, to promote the strategic goal of “emission peak, carbon neutrality”.