A Study of Authentication Method on Fixed Mobile Convergence Environments

Abstract

This paper describes an authentication method aiming at providing consistent security communications on fixed mobile convergence (FMC) environments. The next generation network is now under studying in several standard organizations. Access networks can be integrated into the IP based core network by an IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) and achieve FMC. The existing IMS authentication method is based on the third generation cellular mechanism, and the IMS access User Equipment (UE) must support an IMS Subscriber Identification Module (ISIM) which can provide high security compared to other methods. However, it is relatively difficult to support an ISIM for all UEs from backward compatibility viewpoint. So we evaluate several IMS authentication methods to achieve an IMS access for a non-ISIM capable UE, and the proposed solution can achieve to provide high security communication with no impacts on the existing IMS, and achieve roaming with high scalability.