Hardware-Accelerated Firewall for 5G Mobile Networks
Ruben Ricart‐Sanchez, Pedro Malagón, José M. Alcaraz Calero, Qi Wang · 2018
The evolution from the current Fourth-Generation (4G) networks to the emerging Fifth-Generation (5G) technologies implies significant changes in the architecture and poses demanding requirements on network infrastructures. One of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in 5G is to ensure a secure network with zero downtime. In this paper, we focus on the provisioning of protection capabilities for 5G infrastructures. Our objective is to implement a new 5G firewall that allows the detection, differentiation and selective blocking of 5G network traffic in the edge-to-core network segment of a 5G infrastructure, using a hardware-accelerated framework based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), developed using the P4 language. The proposed 5G firewall has been prototyped with the new capabilities proposed empirically validated.