A Cross-layer Collaborative Handover Authentication Approach for 5G Heterogeneous Network

Abstract

The next fifth generation mobile network (5G) is going to have a massive impact on almost new frontier technological applications in everything from smartphones to future vehicles, with highly heterogeneous, broadband access everywhere, faster speeds, lower latency and higher throughput. As moving to 5G, security architecture must also evolve, especially to seek for more efficient and secure handover authentication solutions. In this work, we design our security mechanism based on physical layer and upper layer cryptographic techniques, combining the advantages of these techniques to achieve a faster and more reliable authentication objective for 5G HetNets. In the cross-layer authentication solution, we firstly execute the handover authentication in physical-layer. Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) hypothesis is adopted by exploiting the physical layer attributes of wireless channels. If it pass the initial authentication, then we implement the EAP/AKA authentication to achieve a more reliable security objective. Finally, the numerical simulation results and discussions are presented to show the feasibility of the proposed approach.