Unified Security Architecture Research for 5G Wireless System

Abstract

The concept of future 5G (5th generation mobile networks or 5th generation wireless systems) widely spreads in industry, but the related standards are still unclear. This paper focuses on the security standard for 5G network, which is one key component covering whole system. The objective is to provide a general protection scheme for both whole infrastructure and some critical components, without introducing too much overhead. The unified security architecture is presented for 5G in order to meet the increasing security requirement. The architecture is more efficient for new standard to cope with threats from both WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) and mobile access equipments in a consistent way. Therefore a unified security architecture is proposed which contains differentiated counter-measures for these threats. Specifically, the security architecture integrates six modules: unified authentication, additional authentication, encryption, unified access, additional access, and unified integrated security.