This paper reviews protection schemes for meshed distribution networks. It gives emphasis to the increasing penetration of electric vehicles, their charging patterns, and to the increasing value of distributed generators, especially from renewables. It includes a preliminary analysis on system planning with electric vehicles that is studied probabilistically and a more detailed analysis of the expected changes introduced by these new loads. Finally, a real time hardware-in-the-loop review analysis for protection systems and the open source networks available for protection studies from several sources are also provided. This work could be useful as a collective review of the recent bibliography on protection for meshed networks, giving emphasis to electric vehicles and their real time simulation.