Smart Grid Integration into Smart Cities

The smart cities have been recently regarded as the effective and reasonable solution for a better way of living. This leads the way for transforming everything around us to be digital and smarter. One of the most crucial pillars of the smart cities and its sustainability is the electricity and power generation, which makes the smart grid and its development an important research topic. In the smart cities every smart application and smart service has its own power and connectivity requirements. The 5G and its network slicing technology is envisioned to be the solution to enable several smart services with different network capabilities. The network slicing is acting as the enabler for the virtualization of mobile private network (MPN) feature, which when introduced to the smart application uplifts its capabilities to another higher level. The work in this paper focuses on the smart grid integration with the smart cities using the 5G technology, showing the advantages of the network slicing and the benefit of introducing the virtual MPN to smart cities.