ENG2575 OL68 Technical Writing, Fall 2021

To: Professor Ellis
From Kiara Ortiz
Date: September 28, 2021
Subject: 500 -Word Summary of Article

1. The following writing is about a 500-word summary of scholarly article on how network slicing can be secured when dividing a network up to increase privacy in a 5G network. The technology used to make this a reality is called blockchain. So, with the help of blockchain the authors are proposing a means by which to preserve privacy when slicing up a network for greater performance. With this methodology performance won’t come at the cost of privacy.
2. Network slicing is vital to the 5G standard. The purpose of slicing up a network is to divide up the physical channel (physical frequencies) in space. These divisions become isolated and support the 5G services with a diverse set of performance and service requirements. This slicing paradigm is used to maintain high capacity (greater volume of customers served), lower latency (quicker responses from the internet), and other large-scale services. Many companies are trying to set up infrastructure in 5G and they must meet the requirements to capture the greatest number of customers.
3. 5G services providers must meet a quality standard when deploying a service, this quality standard is called Quality of Service (QoS). Depending on the implantation and type of 5G network there are issues with rollout. One such issue is that in the US majority of rollout has been in the low band 5G which shows a subpar speed increase. Incapable of meeting the needs of US consumers. While in South Korea the 5G infrastructure is incapable enough to maintain a good enough QoS.
4. As a result of these issue and as mentioned earlier, there must be a standard that upkeeps the expectations of consumers. Hence why the service level agreement of network slicing exists, this agreement is proposed to address some the issues aforementioned. The parameters change depending on the customer and network operator, some parameters include secrecy rate, latency, packet loss, and so on.
5. Given this structure of standards monitoring and auditing seems to be an issue as well. Many Cloud platforms, domains, and third-party auditors have been tampering with reports for their own benefits. On the other hand, multi-party monitoring schemes can address these issues, but it is still difficult to trust relationship between a select few parties as a result authenticity of data cannot be guaranteed.
6. Key word here is trust, the most trustful platform/technology that has been discussed in recent memory is Blockchain. So, in this paper the proposal is to use blockchain as a technique to do SLA monitoring and auditing. The paper also notes that privacy leaking may also be a challenge in this paradigm.
7. It is noted that SLA management of 5G network slicing service is at in infancy, and there is much research done in this field yet.
8. The proposal in short is, a blockchain-based 5G network slicing NS-SLA audit model to prevent eavesdroppers. Both costumers and network operators will be involved in monitoring the task of 5G network slicing service and upload the monitored data to the blockchain. This uploading and auditing will be facilitated by a smart contract.
References:

Xiao, K., Geng, Z., He, Y., Xu, G., Wang, C., & Tian, Y. (2021). A blockchain-based privacy-preserving 5G network slicing service level agreement audit scheme. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications & Networking, 2021(1), 1–16. https://doi-org.citytech.ezproxy.cuny.edu/10.1186/s13638-021-02037-8