Group Mobility Scenarios Research Articles

A privacy-preserving handover authentication protocol for a group of MTC devices in 5G networks

Machine Type Communication (MTC) has been emerging for a wide range of applications and services for the Internet of Things (IoT). In some scenarios, a large group of MTC devices (MTCDs) may enter the communication coverage of a new target base station simultaneously. However, the current handover mechanism specified by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 16 incurs high signaling overhead over the access network and the core network for such scenario. Moreover, other existing solutions have several security problems in terms of the failure of key forward secrecy (KFS) and lack of mutual authentication. In this paper, we propose an efficient authentication protocol for a group of MTCDs in all handover scenarios. By the proposal, the messages from two MTCDs are concatenated with an aggregated message authentication code (MAC) and sent by an authenticated group member to reduce the signaling cost. The proposed protocol has been formally evaluated by Scyther tool to prove its security. And it has been analysed on its security functionality to show its ability to resist major typical malicious attacks. Temporary identities of MTCDs have been used to preserve users’ privacy. It can be expected that the proposed protocol is applicable to all kinds of group mobility scenarios such as a platoon of vehicles or a high-speed train. The performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed protocol is efficient in terms of computational, communication, signaling, and energy cost.

An efficient anonymous group handover authentication protocol for MTC devices for 5G networks

Machine Type Communication (MTC) has been emerging for a wide range of applications and services for the Internet of Things (IoT). In some scenarios, a large group of MTC devices (MTCDs) may enter the communication coverage of a new target base station simultaneously. However, the current handover mechanism specified by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) incur high signalling overhead over the access network and the core network for such scenario. Moreover, other existing solutions have several security problems in terms of failure of key forward secrecy (KFS) and lack of mutual authentication. In this paper, we propose an efficient authentication protocol for a group of MTCDs in all handover scenarios. By the proposal, the messages of two MTCDs are concatenated and sent by an authenticated group member to reduce the signalling cost. The proposed protocol has been analysed on its security functionality to show its ability to preserve user privacy and resist from major typical malicious attacks. It can be expected that the proposed scheme is applicable to all kinds of group mobility scenarios such as a platoon of vehicles or a high-speed train. The performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed protocol is efficient in terms of computational and signalling cost.

Group Mobility Detection and User Connectivity Models for Evaluation of Mobile Network Functions

Group mobility in mobile networks is responsible for dynamic changes in user accesses to base stations, which eventually lead to degradation of network quality of service (QoS). In particular, the rapid movement of a dense group of users intensively accessing the network, such as passengers on a train passing through a densely populated area, significantly affects the perceived network QoS. For better design and operation of mobile network facilities and functions in response to this issue, monitoring group mobility and modeling the access patterns in group mobility scenarios are essential. In this paper, we focus on fast and dense group mobility and mobile network signaling data ( control-plane data ), which contains information related to mobility and connectivity. Firstly, we develop a lightweight method of group mobility detection to extract train passengers from all users’ signaling data without relying on precise location information about users, e.g., based on GPS. Secondly, based on the same signaling data and the results obtained by the detection method, we build connected/idle duration models for train users and non-train users. Finally, we leverage these models in mobile network simulations to assess the effectiveness of a dynamic base station switching/orientation scheme to mitigate QoS degradation with low power consumption in a group mobility scenario. The obtained models reveal that train users consume 3.5 times more resources than non-train users, which proves that group mobility has a significant effect on mobile networks. The simulation results show that the dynamic scheme of base station improves users’ perceived throughput, latency and jitter with small amount of additional power consumption in case of a moderate number of train users, but its ineffectiveness with larger number of train users is also shown. This would suggest that group mobility detection and the obtained connection/idle duration models based solely on control-plane data analytics are usable and useful for the development of mobility-aware functions in base stations.

Group vertical handoff management in heterogeneous networks

AbstractTraditional vertical handover schemes postulate that vertical handovers (VHOs) of users come on an individual basis. This enables users to know previously the decision already made by other users, and then the choice will be accordingly made. However, in case of group mobility, almost all VHO decisions of all users, in a given group (e.g., passengers on board a bus or a train equipped with smart phones or laptops), will be made at the same time. This concept is called group vertical handover (GVHO). When all VHO decisions of a large number of users are made at the same time, the system performance may degrade and network congestion may occur. In this paper, we propose two fully decentralized algorithms for network access selection, and that is based on the concept of congestion game to resolve the problem of network congestion in group mobility scenarios. Two learning algorithms, dubbed Sastry Algorithm and Q‐Learning Algorithm, are envisioned. Each one of these algorithms helps mobile users in a group to reach the nash equilibrium in a stochastic environment. The nash equilibrium represents a fair and efficient solution according to which each mobile user is connected to a single network and has no intention to change his decision to improve his throughput. This shall help resolve the problem of network congestion caused by GVHO. Simulation results validate the proposed algorithms and show their efficiency in achieving convergence, even at a slower pace. To achieve fast convergence, we also propose a heuristic method inspired from simulated annealing and incorporated in a hybrid learning algorithm to speed up convergence time and maintain efficient solutions. The simulation results also show the adaptability of our hybrid algorithm with decreasing step size‐simulated annealing (DSS‐SA) for high mobility group scenario. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Routing in the presence of groups in mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of cooperative mobile nodes that communicate over a shared wireless medium, in the absence of a supporting infrastructure such as base stations. It is envisaged that MANETs will serve applications in which a group of mobile nodes collaborate to carry out a specific task, for instance, a group of mobile tourists taking a city tour. Mobile nodes participating in a group adhere to a movement pattern that maintains spatial proximity between all group members. The coordinated motion of group members and the resulting group-wise clustering of nodes, as well as the atypical traffic requirements of group mobility scenarios present a substantially different networking environment than in conventional MANETs. A routing protocol specifically tailored to exploit group mobility is, therefore, designed in this work. A service discovery-based approach to the creation of groups at the application layer and their configuration at the routing layer is first described. Next, a hierarchical design of the routing protocol that discriminates between intra- and inter-group communications is proposed. A performance evaluation of the protocol is done in network simulator-2 (ns-2).

Group mobility support in mobile WiMAX networks

Group mobility refers to the scenarios that multiple mobile stations (MSs) move in a group at the same time, generally in the same direction with a short distance of separation. In the normal operation, when the group of MSs moves out of the coverage of the current serving BS and into that of another BS, multiple handovers processes should be performed at almost the same time. Large latency will be incurred due to the collisions of the ranging requests from the MSs in the group and the extra time for the corresponding backoff. Especially, when the number of MSs in the group is larger, the handover latency becomes much more significant and it would affect transmissions seriously. In this paper, we propose a group handover scheme to design an efficient and effective handover process with low latency for the group mobility scenarios in the mobile WiMAX networks. The Bridge MS is introduced to integrate several handover processes for the group of MSs into only one, which could eliminate the collision of the ranging requests and shorten the latency incurred. The results of the evaluation show that much lower handover latency for the group of MSs during the handover could be obtained by the proposed scheme and the improvement becomes significant as the number of MSs is increased in the group.

Location Management Congestion Problem in Wireless Networks

We propose and study the location management congestion problem arising in the group mobility scenarios. In the hot-spot locations, e.g., supermarket, bus interchange, or public transportation systems, a large number of travelers move into the same area concurrently and trigger the location update (LU) procedure simultaneously to register their new locations. However, due to the limited bandwidth in a base station, only a small part of the LU requests has the opportunity to capture a radio channel and succeeds in refreshing the new information to the corresponding database in the wireless networks. The remaining mobile terminals (MTs) are unable to obtain a radio channel, and consequently, the LU requests are rejected. A significant consequence of a failed LU is the out-of-date location identity in the network databases and, thereafter, the incapability in establishing the valid route for the potential call connection request, which will seriously degrade the network quality-of-service (QoS). We develop a queueing model to characterize the congestion issue and propose a buffer scheme to eliminate this problem. The consequence of the LU failure on the MT's call activity is also investigated. The comparison demonstrates the high efficiency of the proposed approach in decreasing the LU failure as well as the resulting call blocking probability. The analytical model has been validated by the discrete event simulation