TLS Performance Evaluation in the Control Plane of a 5G Core Network Slice

3GPP has recommended 5G providers adopt TLS. It is imperative to study the impact of TLS on 5G control plane traffic. This study aims to study different TLS cipher suites impact on network performance parameters such as packet size, time, and the number of messages sent in distinct 5G control flows. We emulated a 5G core network slice using an open-source project and measured the overhead on the network parameters while 5G slice components transmit control plane traffic on both cases of TLS and no TLS. We examined the impact of different cipher suites of TLS namely, AES128-GCM-SHA256, AES256-GCM-SHA384, and 3DES-EDE-CBC-SHA with key exchange algorithms of RSA (Public Key Encryption) and Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman Ephemeral (ECDHE) on the NF registration with NRF, UE registration, and PDU session establishment. We extended the analysis to TL1.3 and TLS 1.2 overhead using the same cipher suite (AES128-GCM-SHA256) on the NF registration procedure