The benefits of deceit: a malicious client in a 5G cellular network

Abstract

As we advance towards Smart Cities, autonomous vehicles and the avalanche of IoT devices proposed for the future, we need to give careful consideration to how easily compromised nodes/devices can impact network state. Current proposals for autonomous smart devices typically use cellular networks as the backhaul or final hop. These devices will leverage existing trust-based client-side channel metrics, such as channel quality indicator (CQI), when the base-station determines scheduling decisions. In this short paper, we investigate the scheduling impact of a malicious device when it changes its channel metrics, so as to improve its download rate or even to negate the download rate of others. We utilise real-time 4K ultra-high definition video delivery as an example of high throughput demand application and compare the delivery rates of multiple devices in an open-source 5G simulated NS-3 network. Our results illustrate that when a malicious client deceives the scheduler, the other clients in the network have a noticeable decrease in both viewable quality and underlying delivery rate (25% decrease in the average video quality across the non malicious clients).