A Study of XR Traffic Characteristics Under Flooding Attacks on 5G Slicing

Network slicing (NS) plays a crucial role in 5G networks; it enables the delivery of heterogeneous services and uses cases such as voice communication, video streaming, and Extended Reality (XR), and it also partitions the physical network into several logical networks, known as network slices, to cater the vertical industries via sharing the physical infrastructure. However, infrastructure and functional sharing present security and privacy challenges. In this work, we examine the characteristics of XR traffic across several 5G slicing configurations in the presence of attacks, including ping flood, User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flood, and registration flood attacks. The primary contribution of our research is the analysis of the impact of these different attacks on the XR traffic using different slice configurations. The results indicate the effects of the different attacks on XR traffic in terms of reducing the traffic throughput (Mbps) and the changes in the XR traffic characteristics in the different slice configurations. Also, the isolation of the Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) in the user plane provides better performance in the presence of these attacks.