The role of security orchestrator in network slicing for future networks

Abstract

The traditional paradigm of connecting mobile devices over the telecommunication networks for voice communication has evolved to a myriad of novel applications with heterogeneous network requirements. The conventional telecommunication networks require a radical change to support these applications. Network slicing (NS) is one of the utilitarian technologies in future telecommunication networks to address this challenge by dividing the physical network into multiple logical networks with different network characteristics. The evolution in the applications and telecommunication networks intensifies the attention towards the security aspects. Since NS architecture is at its preliminary level, there is no security-specific element in the slicing architecture to perform security-related operations. Hence, we introduce the novel concept of security orchestrator for the NS architecture. This paper extensively discusses the expected advantages and design aspects of such a separate security orchestrator for an NS ecosystem. Moreover, the viability and the benefits of employing the proposed security orchestrator are demonstrated via a testbed implementation and relevant simulations. Finally, a set of potential future research directions related to the security orchestrator are introduced to further improve the proposed architecture's performance.