Fundamentals of 5G Mobile Networks

9Security for 5G Communications

Georgios Mantas,¹ Nikos Komninos,² Jonathan Rodriguez¹, Evariste Logota¹ and Hugo Marques¹

¹ Instituto de Telecomunicações, Aveiro, Portugal

² City University London, London, UK

9.1 Introduction

Nowadays, the trend towards a ubiquitous computing environment, as envisioned by [1], has led to mobile networks characterised by continuously increasing demand for high data rates and mobility. The most prominent technology that has emerged to address these issues is 5G mobile and a lot of effort has been put into developing it over the past few years with the vision of it being deployed by 2020 and beyond. 5G communications aim at providing big data bandwidth, infinite capability of networking and extensive signal coverage in order to support a rich range of high-quality personalised services to the end users. Towards this aim, 5G communications will integrate multiple existing advanced technologies with innovative new techniques. However, this integration will lead to tremendous security challenges in future 5G mobile networks [2].

Particularly, it is expected that a wide spectrum of security issues will be raised in 5G mobile networks due to a number of factors including: (i) the IP-based open architecture of the 5G system, (ii) the diversity of the underlying access network technologies of the 5G system, (iii) the plethora of interconnected communicating devices, which will also be highly mobile and dynamic, (iv) the heterogeneity of device types ...