SH-CRAN: Hierarchical framework to support mobile big data computing in a secure manner

The heterogeneous cloud radio access network (H-CRAN) has been emerging as a cost-effective solution supporting huge volumes of mobile traffic in the big data era. This paper investigates potential security challenges on H-CRAN and analyzes their likelihoods and difficulty levels. Typically, the security threats in H-CRAN can be categorized into three groups, i.e., security threats towards remote radio heads (RRHs), those towards the radio cloud infrastructure and towards backhaul networks. To overcome challenges made by the security threats, we propose a hierarchical security framework called Secure H-CRAN (SH-CRAN) to protect the H-CRAN system against the potential threats. Specifically, the architecture of SH-CRAN contains three logically independent secure domains (SDs), which are the SDs of radio cloud infrastructure, RRHs and backhauls. The notable merits of SH-CRAN include two aspects: (i) the proposed framework is able to provide security assurance for the evolving H-CRAN system, and (ii) the impacts of any failure are limited in one specific component of H-CRAN. The proposed SH-CRAN can be regarded as the basis of the future security mechanisms of mobile bag data computing.