  With the rapid development of power distribution systems (PDSs), the number
of terminal devices and the types of delivered services involved are constantly
growing. These trends make the operations of PDSs highly dependent on the
support of advanced communication networks, which face two related challenges.
The first is to provide sufficient flexibility, resilience, and security to
meet varying demands and ensure the proper operation of gradually diversifying
network services. The second is to realize the automatic identification of
terminal devices, thus reducing the network maintenance burden. To solve these
problems, this paper presents a novel multiservice network integration and
device authentication slice-based network slicing scheme. In this scheme, the
integration of PDS communication networks enables network resource sharing, and
recovery from communication interruption is achieved through network slicing in
the integrated network. Authentication servers periodically poll terminal
devices, adjusting network slice ranges based on authentication results,
thereby facilitating dynamic network slicing. Additionally, secure
plug-and-play support for PDS terminal devices and network protection are
achieved through device identification and dynamic adjustment of network
slices. On this basis, a network optimization and upgrading methodology for
load balancing and robustness enhancement is further proposed. This approach is
designed to improve the performance of PDS communication networks, adapting to
ongoing PDS development and the evolution of PDS services. The simulation
results show that the proposed schemes endow a PDS communication network with
favorable resource utilization, fault recovery, terminal device plug-and-play
support, load balancing, and improved network robustness.
