5G Networking

There is a talk of the town that from 4G networking we are now going to  fifth generation (5G).  The people are skeptical and a bit excited about 5G when it will be launched.  What will be the overview of 5G networking? It is assumed that the evolutionary part of 5G will consist of improvements in the performance compared to 4G.

Currently, the 5G of cellular networks is under deployment by network operators and new 5G end-user devices are about to be commercialized by many manufacturers and right now 5G is still far from being reached.  One of the main 5G technologies is to be exploited the network slicing.  With the introduction of network slicing, it will be more flexible and efficiently provide the services like voice communication, video streaming, e-health and vehicular communication.

Perceptibly, it is a bit challenging, but the target can be achieved by using the novel technology of network slicing.  In general, the networking slicing is targeted in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), which is currently in progress and motivates on the security aspects of network slicing.

Networking slicing stands with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Network slicing can take advantage of SDN and NFV, but it should act as an independent technology. 

It is important that the security and privacy aspects need to be clarified otherwise the consequences of network slicing might be severe.

As network slicing is a young field, is pertinent to investigate security aspects.  There are three different perspectives:

• Life cycle of a network slice
• Intra-slice security
• Inter-slice security

In order to exposure in 5G, Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) is examined and investigates the security requirements and network capabilities to identify flaws that might emerge through the use of network slicing.

It has been observed that for the development of 5G several research projects have been conducted or are currently in progress, including aspects related to network slicing and security. 

Network slicing is an important aspect that generally allows sharing of the same infrastructure for providing differentiated 5G services.  Now differentiation can be seen in terms of functionality [e.g., mobility, security, control] and performance [e.g., latency, throughput, error rate, reliability, availability].  It is an end-to-end logical network custom mainly define to satisfy required networking characteristics and provide specific services to serve particular use cases [ e.g., voice communication, video streaming, e-health, vehicular communication].  Thus, a logical network is a set of network function instances on top of physical and virtual resources [e.g., storage, network, processing, and access nodes].

The overall architecture of network slicing consists of three layers each with its management functions.  Namely:

• Resource layer
• Network slice instance layer
• Service instance layer

While using 5G, there are general security recommendations related to the inter-slice communication include:

• A minimal security level should be granted for every slice
• In order to prevent attacks, isolation between the slices should be strong enough
• Communication between slices should be reduced at minimum
• Allocation of resources should be minimal

A 5G customer device is allowed to attach to multiple slices since data is important, thus isolation of data should be feasible at the customer device too.

Though there are possible threats and recommendations concerning the 5G networks slicing security and a variety of issues are cropped up that need to be addressed.  This is an early development stage, the in-depth security analysis is to be explored and need to be clarified.  Moreover, there is an indication of some possible research in this direction.