GAHAP: A group-based anonymity handover authentication protocol for MTC in LTE-A networks

Machine Type Communication (MTC) has quickly become the driving force of the mobile operators for a large number of real-time network applications. The design of the MTC security mechanisms in the mobile environments of the Long Term Evaluation-Advanced (LTE-A) networks is the major point of the future research for the LTE-A security. When a good deal of MTC devices simultaneously move to a new eNodeB (eNB), the current third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) handover mechanisms require several handover signaling interactions, which could not only cause the signaling load over the access network and the core network, but also increase the energy consumption of MTC devices. In this paper, we enhance the current handover mechanisms and propose an efficient group-based anonymity handover authentication protocol for a lot of MTC devices with mobility, which is to fit in with all of the mobility scenarios in the LTE-A networks. Compared with the current 3GPP standards, our scheme can not only largely reduce the signaling costs in both the access network and the core network, but also achieve the privacy preservation.