An important characteristic of 5G is the low latency. Imagine a surgeon giving instructions to a team of doctors from a remote location while performing a surgery. Latency introduces lags, lags could cause a communication breakdown, and that could be a potential threat to the patient’s life. In an array of applications, data latency can prove to be disastrous. In others, like Augmented Reality apps or Gaming, latency could be a fundamental detriment to the app experience and usability. 5G is based on the foundation of ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC). It can process a large volume of data in real-time, which enables IoT devices to respond faster and avoid transmission delay. Industries and people can function efficiently without any disruption. For example, hospitals can now replace wired connections with low latency wireless 5G connection during a surgery.

Customer habits and expectations are changing rapidly. This is rapidly becoming the age of the Omnichannel customer. This has driven companies to become customer-centric and create communication strategies designed to connect with customers wherever they are present. To add to that, enterprise workforces are becoming more distributed and widespread. Inevitably, as new channels get added every day, managing communication has become difficult. Enterprises want a solution through which they can communicate with their customers and employees seamlessly on any platform or channel.

5G will enable more complex ecosystems, for instance, including drones and air traffic control, cloud-driven virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, augmented reality, smart factories, cloud-driven robots, transportation, and telemedicine. These kinds of applications need secure communication systems that facilitate more frequent authentication and exchange of more sensitive data. Additionally, several new players, like public service providers, MNOs, and cloud operators, will engage with these services.

Before the emergence of 5G networks, mobile networks owned dedicated communication channels based on GTP and IPsec tunnels. The communication interfaces like X2, S1, S6, S7, which are only utilized in these mobile networks, demand a remarkable level of expertise to attack. However, SDN-based 5G networks won’t have dedicated interfaces like these. Instead they will have common SDN interfaces. The openness of these interfaces could escalate the possible number of attackers. In the present SDN system, the channels are safeguarded using TLS (Transport Layer Security)/ SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) sessions. However, TLS/SSL sessions are known to be susceptible to IP layer attacks, SDN Scanner attacks, and often lack robust authentication mechanisms.

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