The adoption of packet based architecture for the LTE backhaul has brought
to an increased attention to security matters, often considered as critical
issues to be addressed for the deployment of LTE networks.
This paper is an NGMN informative contribution on the subject and aims to
provide a common terminology and some high-level scenarios to introduce to
Industry a few possible implementations for security in LTE backhauling.
The attention has been put on the ways to assemble security mechanisms in a
few scenarios suitable to address the security requirements of an LTE network.
The “per interface” approach has been adopted to analyze every scenario
presented. The term “per interface” refers to LTE interfaces (S1, X2), the core
of this analysis, and the approach undertaken considers what happens to every
LTE interface when crossing some defined points in the backhaul network.
