Novel Differentiated Integrity Protection for Enhancing Performance of Beyond 5G Systems

Secure communication is vital for any wireless technology. However, there is always a tradeoff between security and network performance. Diverse CPS applications in real-time Internet of Things (IoT) with stringent throughput and latency requirements are posing exceptional challenges in terms of system design. Integrity protection (IPr) of the user traffic in 5G and beyond systems introduce a performance overhead, specifically for CPS applications that requires URLLC. In this paper, we explore the tradeoff between security and performance in 5G and beyond wireless networks. We focus on the impact of integrity protection (IPr) on the user plane traffic and its effect on URLLC metrics such as age of information (AoI), throughput, packet overhead, and latency. To address this challenge, we propose a novel mechanism - Differentiated IPr PDU Session (DIPS), which selectively applies IPr only to sensitive user plane traffic. Our experimental results on a 5G system test setup show promising results, including a reduced average AoI, an increase of 70% in throughput, and a reduction of 43% in latency when transferring 2GB of data.