A Comprehensive Guide to 5G Security

10Software Defined Security Monitoring in 5G Networks

Madhusanka Liyanage¹, Ijaz Ahmad¹, Jude Okwuibe¹, Edgardo Montes de Oca², Hoang Long MAI², Oscar López Perez³, and Mikel Uriarte Itzazelaia³

¹ Centre for Wireless Communication, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

² Montimage, Paris, France

³ Nextel S.A., Bilbao, Spain

10.1 Introduction

Network monitoring is a crucial network management enabler for mobile networks. Its importance is growing with the continuous growth of network traffic and the adoption of virtualization. A monitoring system gathers network statistics, traffic, application and user profiles, and flow samples at various intervals and granularities to evaluate the status of the network for different management tasks such as application identification, anomaly detection, network forensics, load balancing, traffic engineering, enforcing Service Level Agreements (SLA), QoS/QoE and network maintenance. Therefore, a network monitoring system should be capable of monitoring the network and traffic flows at different granularities and for obtaining measureable metrics such as level of aggregation, time intervals, bandwidth utilization and accuracy.

Traditionally, network monitoring systems are deployed at specific locations of the mobile network to monitor data at network boundaries or ingress or egress ports. Similarly, many of the currently used security monitoring systems rely on physical systems and interfaces. However, mobile networks are evolving and so also is ...