6Green

The term “critical infrastructure” relates to the infrastructure essential for the functioning of a society and economy and would commonly refer to energy and utilities, the information and communication sector, transportation, water supply, etc. Therefore, any interruptions of critical infrastructure operation, either due to natural or man-made hazards, would have obvious consequences. Most of critical infrastructure operations are enabled by digital means and therefore tends to be designed and deployed by several principles already minimising potential damage, e.g., redundant capabilities, distributed capabilities, uninterruptable power supplies, multiple alternative communication links, etc.

Use case assumes distributed computing capabilities (e.g., edge continuum), including non-public 5GAdvanced/6G network as a main communication channel, supporting critical infrastructure operations. Use case focuses on maintaining operations in case several parts of the computing capabilities are unavailable (e.g., out of power, destroyed, sabotaged, etc.) or may become unavailable due to non-infinite power supply redundancy (e.g., the electrical grid is offline, while the local battery and solar powered backup can provide limited power supply only). Let assume a situation where central cloud location is unavailable for some reasons, while only certain edge and far-edge nodes remain operational, thus remaining capabilities cannot fulfil all requirements. In such a situation, certain functions need to be deprioritised, moved to other execution resources, or even stopped with the final goal of minimising consequences for the customers, i.e., trying to keep key functionalities operational. In fact, such measure needs to be employed as soon as there exists is a risk for the situation not normalising within the time of redundant capabilities remain sufficient.

Although the scenario described focuses on consequences caused by power outage, it can be generalised to any other source of outage, e.g., terrorist attack, natural hazards, cyber-attack, etc.