A Survey on Handover Authentication for Multi-Access Edge Computing: Classification, Analysis, and Future Directions

Handover authentication is a significant process which ensures access control and secure communication in multi-access edge computing (MEC). Although it has been studied for many years in the wireless communication fields, a comprehensive survey for handover authentication is still lacking in the literature. Moreover, research status and new challenges of handover authentication in the context of MEC need be investigated. This paper thereby reviews existing handover authentication schemes and presents a clear definition and classification. It also evaluates security and performance of representative handover authentication schemes. Based on the evaluation, two interesting findings are summarized and two significant research directions of handover authentication for MEC are proposed.