Security Aware Virtual Base Station Placement in 5G Cloud Radio Access Networks

Abstract

In fifth generation (5G) cloud radio access networks (C-RAN), baseband processing of base stations (BS’s) will be processed on virtual machines called virtual BSs (VBS) in the centralized cloud architecture. The existing researches mostly focus on how to maximize resource utilization and reduce energy consumption in 5G C-RAN using VBS placement. However, security issues in the context of VBS placement within 5G C-RAN have been rarely addressed. In this paper, a security aware VBS placement (SAV) scheme within 5G C-RAN is proposed where the placement of VBSs to physical machines (PMs) considers the security levels of both the VBS and the PM. A rigorous simulation study is conducted for validating the proposed scheme, which shows a significant security improvement of 16% compared to the heuristic simulated annealing scheme (HSA).