The fifth generation (5G) of cellular communication will revolutionize the world. This new standard is not a mere technological upgrade from 4G/LTE, but an entirely new way for technological devices to interact with each other.
Examples of how 5G will change society are limitless, but the Alliance for IOT Innovation (AIOTI) has collected a number of use cases. Some examples include:
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With Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), imagine farmers leveraging a suite of drones equipped with sensors to ensure their crops and livestock are all provided the exact treatment they need. Automatically.
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With Automated Valet Parking (AVP), imagine driving to a concert, a sporting event, or any other crowded place, stepping out at the front gates, and letting your car find a parking spot itself. No more fighting for a parking spot.
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With Intelligent Emergency Response Systems, the elderly can be equipped with a device that can detect falls as soon as they happen. Relaying the precise location to emergency services in real-time.
It is possible for the above examples to be implemented with the existing cellular networks. Companies may even exist today that sell those products. However, if those examples are implemented on a grand scale, problems will occur such as reaching the maximum capacity of devices per square kilometer and limitations due to high latency.
Case studies calling for 5G
Let us take a look at the existing wireless technologies that we leverage today. Bluetooth, Zigbee, and Wi-Fi are all secure (if implemented correctly) protocols and sufficient for most use cases. But they possess extremely limited ranges. Cellular networks can have massive range but are limited to 4,000 devices per square kilometer. That capacity is likely reached during an average sporting event in a major city with cell phone usage alone. 5G can handle one million devices per square kilometer which will help to facilitate a smart city full of IoT devices.
Another case study that highlights the benefits of 5G is remote healthcare work. Imagine a world in the midst of a pandemic. With 5G, doctors (who represent the population most likely to come in contact with such a virus) would be able to remotely control a robot to take care of patients or perform surgery with next to no latency at all. 4G/LTE communications have a latency of 20-30 milliseconds. 5G’s latency is less than 10 milliseconds, where most communication will likely hover around 1 millisecond. To the doctor, that kind of low latency would be like playing a video game on their local machine.
The last major case study as to why 5G is needed is video streaming. Video made up over 60% of the total downstream volume of traffic in the first six months of 2019. Naturally, people will want to do this on their phones and 4G’s peak speeds of 1 gigabyte per second just won’t cut it. 5G expands the bandwidth by 20 times where users can theoretically obtain download speeds of 20 gigabytes per second.
Unlike 4G/LTE, where voice, MMS, and data, all possess the same quality of service, network latency, security controls, etc. 5G was designed with a much greater flexibility in mind so it can handle all manner of use cases in appropriate ways.
Evolutions in 5G security architecture
Despite the fact that countries are adopting 5G, the standard is still in active development and the security of the standard is still being worked out. That said, researchers from across the globe have spent time to put together an assessment of the protocol’s security posture. In addition to performance improvements, 5G was designed with an updated security model that includes security features such as data transmission security, and virtualization and software defined networking.
As the cellular generations have developed over time, the encryption and integrity controls have slowly been increasing. With the first generation (1G), anyone tuned into the frequency that a cellular device operated on could listen in on the conversation. The second generation (2G) added encryption between a user device and base station but left the rest of the network lacking. The third and fourth generations effectively added another hop of encryption to their standards.
The situation was made worse by the fact that critical vulnerabilities due to lack of cryptographic and integrity controls were found in the signalling protocols leveraged by those cellular generations. Signalling protocols are what’s leveraged to manage telephone calls, route text messages, and perform roaming. The abuse of these protocols allow adversaries to intercept and listen into phone calls, perform fraudulent cellular activity, track users, and more.
With 5G, the standard has finally reached a point where all signalling traffic is encrypted and integrity protected. And user traffic is encrypted with optional integrity protection. The security edge protection proxy (SEPP) ensures that traffic sent from one network operator to another is encrypted.
Because 5G is implemented in the cloud, all components are virtualized. As such, 5G networks can be constructed like Lego pieces, hot swapping components as needed. Instead of having a flat network where all internal components can talk to each other, 5G can ensure that the only areas of a network that should be able to communicate can. In the case where vulnerabilities are found, machines can be updated or mitigations put in place instantly to address the concerns. The cloud also enables resiliency not found in previous generations of cellular technologies. Cellular components can scale to address communication surges.
Conclusion
The deployment of 5G networks, along with the speed of edge computing and the flexibility of software defined network and cloud computing, will enable a whole host of disruptive technologies - from smart cities to autonomous vehicles. However, the transition will take time as telecommunications companies deploy 5G in phases and slowly upgrade their existing infrastructure.
