Secured VPN Models for LTE Backhaul Networks

The Long Term Evolution (LTE) architecture proposes a flat all-IP backhaul network. 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) specified new security and traffic transport requirements of new LTE backhaul network. However, existing LTE backhaul traffic architectures are incapable of achieving these security requirements. In this paper, we propose two secured Virtual Private Network (VPN) architectures for LTE backhaul. Both architectures are layer 3 Internet Protocol security (IPsec) VPNs which are built using Internet Key exchange version 2 (IKEv2) and Host Identity Protocol (HIP). They are capable of fulfilling 3GPP security requirements such as user authentication, user authorization, payload encryption, privacy protection and IP based attack prevention. We study various IP based attacks on LTE backhaul and our proposed architectures can protect the backhaul network from them.