Convolutional neural networks and mixture of experts for intrusion detection in 5G networks and beyond

The advent of 6G/NextG networks offers numerous benefits, including extreme capacity, reliability, and efficiency. To mitigate emerging security threats, 6G/NextG networks incorporate advanced artificial intelligence algorithms. However, existing studies on intrusion detection predominantly rely on deep neural networks with static components that are not conditionally dependent on the input, thereby limiting their representational power and efficiency. To address these issues, we present the first study to integrate a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture for the identification of malicious traffic. Specifically, we use network traffic data and convert the 1D feature array into a 2D matrix. Next, we pass this matrix through a convolutional neural network (CNN) layer, followed by batch normalization and max pooling layers. Subsequently, a sparsely gated MoE layer is used. This layer consists of a set of expert networks (dense layers) and a router that assigns weights to each expert's output. Sparsity is achieved by selecting only the most relevant experts from the full set. Finally, we conduct a series of ablation experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model. Experiments are conducted on the 5G-NIDD dataset, a network intrusion detection dataset generated from a real 5G test network, and the NANCY dataset, which includes cyberattacks from the O-RAN 5G Testbed Dataset. The results show that our introduced approach achieves accuracies of up to 99.96% and 79.59% on the 5G-NIDD and NANCY datasets, respectively. The findings also show that our proposed model offers multiple advantages over state-of-the-art approaches.