The impact of mobility, beam sweeping and smart jammers on security vulnerabilities of 5G cells

TL;DR

This paper examines how mobility, beam sweeping, and smart jammers affect 5G network security, revealing vulnerabilities and mitigation strategies through detailed analysis of jamming effects on cell metrics and synchronization signals.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the impact of jamming and beam sweeping on 5G security, including the effectiveness of beam sweeping against smart jammers and the vulnerability of specific channels.

Findings

Increasing jamming power beyond 40 dBm does not further reduce throughput due to HARQ.

PDSCH is more vulnerable than PSS and SSS under jamming.

Beam sweeping significantly reduces jamming impact, lowering error vector magnitude from 51.59% to 23.36%.

Abstract

The vulnerability of 5G networks to jamming attacks has emerged as a significant concern. This paper contributes in two primary aspects. Firstly, it investigates the effect of a multi-jammer on 5G cell metrics, specifically throughput and goodput. The investigation is conducted within the context of a mobility model for user equipment (UE), with a focus on scenarios involving connected vehicles (CVs) engaged in a mission. Secondly, the vulnerability of synchronization signal block (SSB) components is examined concerning jamming power and beam sweeping. Notably, the study reveals that increasing jamming power beyond 40 dBm in our specific scenario configuration no longer decreases network throughput due to the re-transmission of packets through the hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) process. Furthermore, it is observed that under the same jamming power, the physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) is more vulnerable than the primary synchronization signal (PSS) and secondary synchronization signal (SSS). However, a smart jammer can disrupt the cell search process by injecting less power and targeting PSS-SSS or physical broadcast channel (PBCH) data compared to a barrage jammer. On the other hand, beam sweeping proves effective in mitigating the impact of a smart jammer, reducing the error vector magnitude root mean square from 51.59% to 23.36% under the same jamming power.