Virtual security as a service for 5G verticals

Abstract

The future 5G systems ought to meet diverse requirements of new industry verticals, such as Massive Internet of Things (IoT), broadband access in dense networks and ultra-reliable communications. Network slicing is an important concept that is expected to support these 5G verticals and cope with the conflicting requirements of their respective services. Network slicing allows the deployment of multiple virtual networks, or slices, over the same physical infrastructure as well as supporting on-demand resource allocation to those slices. In this paper, we propose an architecture that will explore how both Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) may be leveraged to secure a network slice on-demand, addressing the new security concerns imposed to the network management by the flexibility and elasticity support. Our proposed framework aims to ensure an optimal resource allocation that manages the slice security strategy in an efficient way. Moreover, experimental performance evaluations are presented to evaluate the security overhead in virtualized environments.