Advanced 5G Network Slicing Isolation Using Enhanced VPN+ for Healthcare Verticals

Abstract

Alongside enabling connectivity for people and societies, the fifthGeneration networks (5G) aimed towards establishing an all-inclusive ecosystem for Internet of Things to sustain variety of industrial verticals such as e-health, smart home, smart city, etc. With the successful implementation of 5G infrastructure, it is understood that the traditional security approaches incorporated in the previous 4th generation networks (4G) may not suffice to protect users and industries from adversaries that develop more advanced attack vectors. This is mostly attributed the vulnerabilities imposed by softwareization (Softwareization of networks, clouds, and internet of things https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ pdf/10.1002/nem.1967.) and virtualization of the network which compromise the isolation and protection of the 5G network slices essential for the support of IoT verticals. In this work, we propose an innovative approach to enhance the isolation of network slices by employing the Enhanced Virtual Private Network+ (VPN+) technology. Furthermore, we demonstrate the impact of an encrypted communication at the transport backhaul network in 5G scenario in terms of defensive success against virtualization layer attacks in the cloud.