Advanced 5G Network Slicing Isolation Using Enhanced VPN+ for Healthcare Verticals

Abstract

Alongside of supporting the human world, 5G aimed towards establishing an all-inclusive ecosystem for Internet of Things to sustain variety of industrial verticals such as e-health, smart home, smart city, etc. With the successful implementation of multitude of sites, it has come to realization that the traditional security approaches incorporated in the 4th generation networks (LTE) may not suffice to protect 5G users and industries from adversaries that develop more advanced attack vectors. This is mostly due to the vulnerabilities brought by softwareization and virtualization of the network which compromise the isolation and protection of the 5G network slices essential for the support of IoT verticals. In this work, we propose a progressive approach to enhance the isolation of network slices by employing the Enhanced VPN+ technology. Furthermore, we describe a method for tackling DDoS and flooding attacks on the communication between the 4G/5G core networks and the Cloud-Radio Access Network, as well as the radio frontend.