3GPP Edge–Fog federation: Transparent 3rd-party authentication and application mobility

Abstract

3GPP edge and fog computing paradigms provide computational services to users at low latency. These paradigms alone are not enough to fulfill the users’ requirements completely. Therefore, a federation among these computing paradigms is necessary. To realize such federation, there is a need of an authentication mechanism where subscribers of a fog, can access 3GPP edge’s services, or vice versa, without buying new subscription, and an application mobility mechanism for continuous service during handover from 3GPP edge to fog, or vice versa, without re-authentication. In this work,33This work is an extension of [1] with inclusion of two new scenarios, extended testbed, and more results. we propose: (1) a proxy-based state transfer and third-party authentication (PS3A), that uses a transparent proxy to transfer the authentication and application state information between 3GPP edge and fog, and (2) a token-based state transfer and proxy-based third-party authentication (TSP3A), that uses the proxy to transfer the authentication information and tokens to transfer application state information between 3GPP edge and fog. The proxy plays different roles, via virtual counterparts of entities involved in these protocols, to provide transparency. When the 3GPP edge, using EPS-AKA, receives an authentication request, the proxy relays and behaves as a virtual Home Subscriber Server (vHSS) for the 3GPP edge, and behaves as a virtual user for the fog, which is using OIDC. We applied PS3A and TSP3A to three federation scenarios among 3GPP edge and fog. Experimental results show that PS3A and TSP3A provide authentication within 0.345–2.858 s for a 0–100 Mbps proxy load. The results further show that TSP3A provides application mobility, while taking 40%–52% less time than PS3A, using state tokens. TSP3A and PS3A also reduce the service interruption latency by 82.4% and 84.6%, compared to the cloud-based service, via tokens and prefetching.