An Efficient Handover Authentication Mechanism for 5G Wireless Network

In an ultra-dense fifth-generation (5G) wireless network, the deployment of dense cells with a large number of base stations can cause frequent handovers, which could lead to higher handover delays and some security issues to make the network difficult to meet various requirements of 5G wireless networks. To target this problem, we propose to employ Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) servers into the traditional authentication architecture for re-authentication. Moreover, we improve the existing Extensible Authentication Protocol-Authentication and Key Agreement (EAP-AKA) protocol to design a new authentication mechanism over this authentication architecture. To enhance security functionality, pseudonyms are used instead of permanent names and a one-way hash function is used for the authentication. The results of formal verification and performance evaluation show that the proposed handover authentication mechanism can reduce the authentication delays and ensuring the security of the proposed handover authentication scheme.