Neuro-Fuzzy Based Handover Authentication Protocol for Ultra Dense 5G Networks

Smart grids improve the management of various power network components as well as the monitoring of power flows. Their deployments require very fast communication channels, which can be facilitated by 5G networks. However, 5G's ultra-densification boost system capacity and spectrum efficiency but introduce vulnerabilities due to the incorporation of many wireless network technologies and devices. The conventional 5G handover authentication protocols have security challenges that expose them to attacks such as message replay. As such, many authentication protocols have been proposed to secure smart grid data transmission. However, these protocols are unreliable in attacks detection and prevention, energy inefficient, have high latencies, heavy communication as well as computational overheads. In this paper, a 5G key management and handover protocol is developed to address some of these security and performance issues. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol preserves perfect forward key secrecy, is robust against de-synchronization, replay, man-in-the-middle (MITM), denial of services (DoS) and jamming attacks. Performance analysis showed that it has low communication overheads, space complexity and handover authentication latencies. Compared with 3GPP R16, the proposed protocol showed a 25% and 42.9% improvement in communication overheads and space complexity respectively.