Analysis of Authentication Parameters in Uplink Scenario of Heterogeneous Networks

The role of Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) at providing sufficient capacity based on fast growing demands of user equipment (UE) is not deniable. Design of a secure and robust authentication mechanism for the mobile users is essential on the other hand. A mathematical model of a HetNet equipped with butterfly-graph authentication mechanism is derived here that takes into account packet loss probability and provides strong tools for studying HetNets. Outage and authentication failure are two of the main reasons for packet loss in HetNets. The former stems from higher interference in HetNets. Attacks on the authentication signals, and noisy channels are only a few reasons for the latter to be named here. The main evaluation metric here is user experience in terms of throughput which is derived for uplink scenario of a K-tier HetNet, where queuing theory is exploited to model an M/G/1 queue with interruption operating at the packet level, stochastic geometry is used to find the outage probability of tiers, and finally a graph-theory based algorithm is the basis of finding the authentication failure probability in closed form. The effect of authentication parameters on the statistics of the UE queue length is the main focus of this paper which leads to direct impressions on throughput, which is next followed by analyzing the effect of using butterfly-graph based signatures on the overhead that is imposed to the system. The results show that there is significant reduction in the overhead when using this scheme compared to the case that each packet is signed individually. All of these benefits are conditioned on proper choice of parameters such that the stability condition of system is satisfied.