Vehicle-to-Grid as a 5G Smart Grid Vertical: Non-Technical Barriers and Implications for Communication Networks

Abstract

Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) and broader Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technologies are technically mature and widely demonstrated, yet large-scale deployment is constrained mainly by non-technical rather than communication or power-electronics limits. This paper targets the wireless communications community and frames V2G as a 5G-enabled smart grid vertical, linking business, governance, social, and infrastructure barriers to concrete communication-system requirements. Building on a PRISMA-guided systematic review of 974 V2G/V2X publications (2009-2025), and 162 implementation-critical studies, we adopt a four-domain framework of non-technical barriers: Business/Economic, Governance/Policy, Social, and Infrastructure/Ecosystem. Temporal and regional analyses show a shift from technical dominance to multidisciplinary integration after 2021. We translate these domains into communication requirements for V2G verticals, including fine-grained metering and settlement, protocol interoperability (e.g., ISO~15118, OCPP), privacy-by-design data governance, latency- and reliability-differentiated services, and edge-cloud partitioning for flexibility control. The results demonstrate that 5G design for V2G cannot be a purely technical optimization task and must integrate socio-technical constraints from the outset, suggesting research directions for sustainable, data-driven V2G communication architectures.