Highly-scalable software firewall supporting one million rules for 5G NB-IoT networks

There is a significant lack of software firewalls for 5G networks especially when the support for the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies such NB-IoT are considered. The main contribution of this research work is an advanced software firewall based on the Open Virtual Switch (OVS), which is able to provide firewall capabilities over these 5G IoT devices. The proposed software firewall is able to significantly scale up the number of rules to fulfill the 5G Key Performance Indicator of controlling 1 million IoT devices per square kilometer. Intensive experimental results are achieved in this work, validating the suitability of the proposed architecture for this remarkable level of scalability. In the most demanding conditions, where more than 1 million of firewall rules are installed and 1 million NB-IoT devices are sending traffic, yielding a total of 4 Gbps, the system shows only 8% of packet loss and 4 ms delay.