A Novel Network Slicing based Security-as-a-Service (SECaaS) Framework for Private 5G Networks

Fifth Generation (5G) and beyond telecommunication networks introduce a set of novel technologies such as private 5G networks, also known as Local 5G Operator (L5GO), and Network Slicing (NS) for the realization of diverse novel applications with heterogeneous network requirements. Among other network-level requirements, security is a critical challenge in L5GO networks. Facilitating the security requirements in an NS-enabled L5GO environment while increasing resource utilization efficiency is arduous. This paper introduces a novel security framework for NS-enabled L5GO networks. The proposed framework increases the scalability, dynamicity, and flexibility of the system while focusing on reducing the cost. Moreover, this paper verifies the functionality of the security framework using a real testbed. Extensive experiments are performed to analyze the framework’s behaviour in terms of resource conservation, cost reduction, and latency variation.