Visible to the public Implementation of Physical Layer Security into 5G NR Systems and E2E Latency Assessment

TitleImplementation of Physical Layer Security into 5G NR Systems and E2E Latency Assessment
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2022
AuthorsTorres-Figueroa, Luis, Hörmann, Markus, Wiese, Moritz, Mönich, Ullrich J., Boche, Holger, Holschke, Oliver, Geitz, Marc
Conference NameGLOBECOM 2022 - 2022 IEEE Global Communications Conference
Date Publisheddec
Keywords3GPP, 5G, codes, Collaboration, composability, compositionality, delays, Downlink, encoding, Human Behavior, human factors, information theoretic security, Metrics, modular coding scheme, physical layer security, policy-based governance, pubcrawl, resilience, Resiliency, Scalability, security, software-defined radio, URLLC, wiretap channel
AbstractThis paper assesses the impact on the performance that information-theoretic physical layer security (IT-PLS) introduces when integrated into a 5G New Radio (NR) system. For this, we implement a wiretap code for IT-PLS based on a modular coding scheme that uses a universal-hash function in its security layer. The main advantage of this approach lies in its flexible integration into the lower layers of the 5G NR protocol stack without affecting the communication's reliability. Specifically, we use IT-PLS to secure the transmission of downlink control information by integrating an extra pre-coding security layer as part of the physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) procedures, thus not requiring any change of the 3GPP 38 series standard. We conduct experiments using a real-time open-source 5G NR standalone implementation and use software-defined radios for over-the-air transmissions in a controlled laboratory environment. The overhead added by IT-PLS is determined in terms of the latency introduced into the system, which is measured at the physical layer for an end-to-end (E2E) connection between the gNB and the user equipment.
DOI10.1109/GLOBECOM48099.2022.10001457
Citation Keytorres-figueroa_implementation_2022