Towards automatic deployment of virtual firewalls to support secure mMTC in 5G networks

Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as the main enabler to deal with challenging use cases that require massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC), and mMTC has been recognized as one of three use case types for the Fifth Generation (5G) and beyond networks. In IoT networks, it is prohibitive to rely on just one firewall where hundreds of thousands of rules need to be installed in order to provide security countermeasures to each of the IoT devices. To fill this gap, this paper proposes an automatic deployment of virtual firewalls by leveraging Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) Management and Orchestration (MANO) to protect NB-IoT mMTC communications. The main idea underneath is to use NFV to deal with efficient rule distribution across VNFs-based firewalls to achieve scalability in the number of managed IoT devices. Empirical results have validated the design and implementation of the proposed scheme and demonstrating its advantageous performance and scalability. In particular, the deployment time for this VNF-based firewall service is highlighted to meet the requirement of a 5G Key Performance Indicator (KPI).