What is 5G? What are the Security Concerns?

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5G is going to become necessity for the future of the world due to the increasing traffic rate of the data, voice or video streaming in this modern era. The present technologies such as 3G and 4G cannot fulfill the future requirements of the increasing capacity of the traffic of internet data. There is no unique definition for 5G. It is basic step to know that “What is 5G?” in real sense. First of all, we have to take step to clarify the real means of 5G in technological sense.

According to researchers, Scientists and Engineers the 5G will facilitate user with 1000 times greater bandwidth as well as 100 times larger data rate to cover the huge applications of future mobile stations. [2] It is also expected that various techniques to fulfill the user requirements which will be used in 5G, one of them will be THz band mobile communication. [3] The 5th wireless mobile internet networks are real wireless world which shall be supported by LAS-CDMA, OFDM, MC-CDMA, UWB, Network-LMDS and IPv6. Both 4G and 5G has basic protocol which is IPv6.

A number of generation changes have been experienced by mobile technologies, which have transformed the cellular background into a global set of interrelated networks. By the 2020, fifth generation will supports the voice, video streaming and very complex range of communication services over more than Nine billion of the subscribers as well as the billions of  devices which will be connected to each other. But what is 5G? 5G provides the new path to think. It includes radical network design for installing machine-type communication (MTC). And 5G networks will be able to provide efficient support applications with widely varying operational parameters, providing greater elasticity to install services. As the previous generations, 5G is combination of progressed network technologies.

 Coming technology (5G) would have the ability to share date everywhere, every time by everyone and everything for the benefit of human, businesses and society as well as the technological environment by using bandwidth of unlimited access for carrying information. The year 2016 is an expected year to take steps for proper and Standard activities are started and leading to commercial availability of the equipment and machinery around 2020. Future technology (5G) is much more than new set of technologies that will require enormous equipment/devices or machinery upgrades as compare to the previous generations. The purpose of this technology is to build on the development that the telecommunication systems have already been reached. The complementary technologies (Combination of core and cloud technologies are called complementary technologies) which evolve many existing radio access will be used to cater more traffic of data, more types of devices under different operating requirements with different cases in 5G.

Nevertheless, a universal agreement is building around the idea that 5G is simply integration of number of techniques, scenarios and use cases rather than the origination of a new single radio access technology. The estimated performance levels that 5G [6] technologies will need to cater for:

§  10 to 100 times higher typical user data rate,

§  10 times longer battery life for low power devices,

§  10 to 100 times higher number of connected devices,

§  5 times reduced end-to-end latency,

§  1000 times higher mobile data volume per area. 

Figure 1 shows estimated performance levels of fifth generation technology need to meet requirements.

Now the problem is that “How will we get there?” Next generation (5G) will mostly allow for connectivity. But this technology is not developed in separation. The developing next generation will play significant role in shaping various factors such as long term sustainability, cost, and security and need to give connectivity to the billions of subscribers. While the comprehensive conditions for 5G have nevertheless to be set, it is clear that flexibility to accommodate for thousands of use cases is the key to 5G and what it will enable. The parameters that 5G technology will be developed upon include:

§  Data integrity,

§  Latency,

§  Smart communication.

§  Traffic capacity,

§  Data throughput,

§  Energy consumption, 

§  Technology convergence.

A cognitive radio is an intelligent radio that can be programmed and configured dynamically. Its transceiver is designed to use the best wireless channels in its vicinity. Such a radio automatically detects available channels in wireless spectrum, then accordingly changes its transmission or reception parameters to allow more concurrent wireless communications in a given spectrum band at one location. This process is a form of dynamic spectrum management.

A we all know, one of the fundamental issue is the increasing challenge of acquiring adequate spectral resources in radio frequency bands to operate 5G cellular systems. All over the world, a large amount of spectral resources are still utilized in a static and therefore, inefficient manner. Hence, Cognitive Radio (CR), with the capability to be aware of radio environments and flexibility adjust its transceiver parameters, has drawn much attention in academia and recently also in industry and has been proposed as an enabling technique to dynamically access the underutilized spectral resources. The previous research on CR was focusing on improving the utilization of radio spectrum resources mainly within the primary-secondary user models in the UHF TV band. In 5G wireless communications, to meet the challenging requirements of huge capacity, massive connectivity, high reliability and low latency, CR is expected to play an important role in two aspects. First, since the spectrum band for 5G will be extended to even mm Wave range, CR can still be used to improve the spectrum utilization while protecting much larger range of coexisting users and within broader types of spectrum sharing models, such as licensed spectrum sharing (LSA) and dynamic spectrum leasing etc. Second, 5G will take aggressive spatial reuse of spectrum as one of the key enablers with new techniques such as massive MIMO and Ultra-dense Deployment. In this context, CR can be used to mitigate the interference issues from space, frequency and time domains with a very dynamic manner. We define an attack on cognitive networks as any activity that results in

1.      Unacceptable interference to the licensed primary users or

2.      Missed opportunities for secondary users

Attacks against CRs and CRNs are:

1.      Incumbent Emulation attacks

2.      Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification attacks

3.      Cross layer attacks

Security Concerns in 5G:

Where there is information, there is a critical need for security. Security is one of the important issues for the proposed adaptive and reconfigurable wireless network testbed. The meaning of security is twofold. First, the data sent out by the nodes should be encrypted, to prevent unauthorized users from intercepting the data over the air. However, cryptographic algorithms impose tremendous processing power demands that can be a bottleneck in high-speed networks. The use of FPGAs for cryptographic applications has become highly attractive.

Cryptographic algorithms will be implemented on the two FPGAs on the proposed motherboard for the nodes of the network testbed. However, for the network testbed for smart grid, the optimal choice for the cryptographic scheme is the topic of ongoing research. Second, the reconfigurable FPGAs in the network testbed should have the capability of protecting themselves from being invaded or tampered.

Security is more important than any other performance of interest for the micro grid. To realize a secure system, security should pervade every aspect of the system design, and be integrated into every system component. For information flow, information security for the micro grid should include data confidentiality, data authenticity, data integrity, data freshness, data privacy, public key infrastructure, trusted computing, attack detection, attack survivability, intelligent monitoring, cybersecurity, and so on. For power flow, autonomous recovery is the main security consideration. The micro grid should have the capability of performing real-time monitoring and quick response.

ü  Heterogeneity of wireless networks complicate the security issues. Dynamic reconfigurable, adaptive and lightweight security mechanism should be developed.

ü  Authentication of user is a big problem in heterogeneous wireless networks.

ü  Security in smart grids may be generalized into two main areas:

·         Physical layer

·         Cybersecurity

ü  Interoperability of Security enabled IoT.

ü  Security for M2M Communication.