Security Considerations for the 5G Era

5G is an evolving technology that will usher in an age of accelerated innovation connecting people, things and machines, through continuing improvements in mobile wireless communications. This 5G Americas whitepaper titled “Security Considerations for the 5G Era,” highlights enhanced security protocols for 5G, as it evolves and matures to address emerging, security threats in the wireless cellular landscape.

The white paper identifies how 5G wireless technology significantly differs from previous generations, as the entire wireless cellular network has been re-architected to use new capabilities such as software-defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV) for new services, and cloud-native architectures for scalability. The implementation of these elements requires additional encryption, extra defense in edge networks, and sophisticated new protocols to handle the demands of network slicing, multi-access edge computing (MEC), and a disaggregated, radio access network (RAN).