ISAG: IoT-enabled and Secrecy Aware Group-based handover scheme for e-health services in M2M communication network

Abstract

To provide e-health services in the high-speed advanced/fast-moving medical facility acquainted vehicle by administrating Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication technology is a progressive approach. For accomplishing the robustness and to perceive the security demands of various M2M communication-based services, academicians have discussed group-based handover protocols in the literature. However, the group of medical M2M devices (MMD) suffer from numerous challenges such as privacy-preservation, high signaling congestion at the network, and inadequacy of forward/backward key secrecy at the time of handover authentication. Also, the existing handover schemes are susceptible to network attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS), Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM), etc., and stimulate high network utilization. To avoid the above concerns, we introduce the IoT-enabled and Secrecy Aware Group-based (ISAG) handover authentication and key agreement (AKA) scheme in the LTE-A network for M2M communication. The scheme realizes the mutual authentication between the target base-station and a group of MMDs with a secret session key. Based on message aggregation technology, the ISAG handover protocol averts the communication network congestion and minimizes the bandwidth overhead. The security analysis illustrates that the protocol obtains necessary security requirements such as confidentiality, data integrity, and private key protection. Through performance evaluations, the protocol shows significant improvement in the communication, computation, storage, and transmission overhead compared to the exiting group-based handover protocols. Finally, simulation output by the OpenSSL library of computing bandwidth consumption to network participants illustrates that ISAG handover protocol is appropriate for e-health services.