Abstract
In view of the exponential growth in the volume of wireless data communication among heterogeneous devices ranging from smart phones to tiny sensors across a wide range of applications, 3GPP LTE-A has standardized Machine Type Communication (MTC) which allows communication between entities without any human intervention. The future 5G cellular networks also envisage massive deployment of MTC Devices (MTCDs) which will increase the total number of connected devices hundredfold. This poses a huge challenge to the traditional cellular system processes, especially the traditional Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) mechanism currently used in LTE systems, as the signaling load caused by the increasingly large number of devices may have an adverse effect on the regular Human to Human (H2H) traffic. A solution in the literature has been the use of group based architecture which, while addressing the authentication traffic, has their share of issues. This paper introduces Hierarchical Group based Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement (HGMAKA) protocol to address those issues and also enables the small cell heterogeneous architecture in line with 5G networks to support MTC services. The aggregate Message Authentication Code based approach has been shown to be lightweight and significantly efficient in terms of resource usage compared to the existing protocols, while being robust to authentication message failures, and scalable to heterogeneous network architectures.
Highlights
The market for cellular data is growing at a tremendous pace with the birth of a new generation of cellular system at almost every decade
One of the possible approaches to handle hyper densification of cells is to offload traffic into smaller cells served by low powered base stations like micro and pico eNodeBs, Home eNodeBs (HeNB), Relay Nodes (RN), and even Remote Radio Heads (RRH)
A comparative analysis of the proposed HGMAKA protocol vis-a-vis ten others discussed in Section 4 was performed with respect to three different metrics: (a) number of signaling messages exchanged in executing the protocol; (b) communication cost, that is, the amount of data transferred in executing the protocols; and (c) computational complexity, that is, the time taken for executing the cryptographic operations involved in the protocols, by both the Machine Type Communication Devices (MTCDs) and the network
Summary
The market for cellular data is growing at a tremendous pace with the birth of a new generation of cellular system at almost every decade. The existing literature on MTC authentication has tried to find different approaches to reduce the signaling traffic needed for the AKA procedure by grouping the MTCDs based on different criteria like belonging to the same application, appearing in the same location, and so forth. In view of resource constrained devices used in most M2M applications, it uses the lightweight symmetric key based aggregate Message Authentication Code (MAC) approach with integrity verification of authentication messages at each level of the hierarchy This eliminates the chance of group authentication failure at the core network which can otherwise be caused, in the existing group based schemes using aggregate MAC, by even a single corrupt MAC appearing in the aggregate authentication message. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides an overview of MTC under LTE-A, the mutual AKA protocol, and the importance of heterogeneous cellular network architecture; Section 3 spells out the motivation behind the proposed protocol; Section 4 reviews some related works from the literature on group based mutual AKA protocols and highlights the issues therein; Sections 5 and 6 present the proposed system architecture along with the proposed protocol; Section 7 presents the security analysis of the protocol; Section 8 provides performance analysis of the proposed protocol vis-a-vis existing group based protocols; and Section 9 concludes the paper
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