_applied sciences_  
_Article_  
**Hybrid Traffic Scheduling in 5G and Time-Sensitive Networking Integrated Networks for Communications of Virtual Power Plants**  
**[PERSON] 1,2, [PERSON] 1,2,3,*, [PERSON] 1,2, [PERSON] 1,2 and [PERSON] 4,*  
1 State Grid Smart Grid Research Institute Co., Ltd., Beijing 10209, China; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (J.W. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (J.T. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (SL.) 2 State Grid Laboratory of Electric Power Communication Network Technology, Beijing 102209, China  
3 School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China  
4 China Electric Power Research Institute Co., Ltd., Beijing 100192, China  
* Correspondence: [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (C.L. ); [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (W.G.) **Abstract** The virtual power plant is one of the key technologies for the integration of various distributed energy resources into the power grid. To enable its smooth and reliable operation, the network infrastructure that connects the components for critical communications becomes a research challenge. Current communication networks based on the traditional Ethernet and long-term evolution cannot provide the required deterministic low latency or reliable communication services. This paper presents a three-layer virtual power plant communication architecture with 5G and time-sensitive networking integrated networks for both determinism and mobility. The service types and traffic requirements of the virtual power plant are analyzed and mapped between 5G and time-sensitive networking to guarantee their quality of service. This paper proposes a semi-persistent scheduling with reserved bandwidth sharing and a pre-emption mechanism for time-critical traffic to guarantee its bounded latency and reliability while improving the bandwidth utilization. The performance evaluation results show that the proposed mechanism effectively reduces the end-to-end delay for both time-triggered traffic and event-triggered traffic compared with the dynamic scheduling method. For event-triggered traffic, the proposed mechanism has comparable end-to-end delay performance to the static scheduling method. It largely improves the resource utilization compared to the static scheduling method when the network load becomes heavy. It achieves an optimum performance tradeoff between delay and resource utilization when the percentage of the reserved resource blocks is 30% in the simulation. virtual power plant; 5G; time-sensitive networking; semi-persistent scheduling [PERSON] and [PERSON]  
Received: 11 May 2023  
Received: 29 June 2023  
Accepted: 5 July 2023  
Published: 7 July 2023  
**Copyright**\(\copy\) 2023 by the authors. Liconssee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license ([[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)]([https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/))). **1. Introduction**  
The smart grid, microgrid, and virtual power plant (VPP) are key technologies to efficiently utilize renewable energies in the power grid for energy sustainability and a reduction in carbon emission [1]. The distributed generation technologies with renewable energy provide the advantages of reliability, economy, and flexibility for power grid systems. Renewable energy resources are expected to contribute more than 40% of the total generated electricity by the year 2050 [2]. However, distributed renewable energy such as wind, solar, water, and hydropower exhibits the characteristics of unpredictability, heterogeneity, randomness, fluctuations, and intermittence [3]. How to efficiently utilize the distributed energy resources by VPP while keeping the stability of the new power grid systems is a great research challenge. To improve the control and scheduling performance of the new power grid systems, information, communication and networking technologies are of great importance [4,5].