A Blockchain-Assisted Seamless Handover Authentication for V2I Communication in 5G Wireless Networks

The Fifth Generation (5G) wireless network needs many base stations to provide ultra-high throughput. Thus, the vehicles in Vehicles to Infrastructure (V2I) communication over a 5G wireless network have to perform more frequent mutual authentications than before, which will greatly reduce the efficiency of the entire network. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel handover authentication protocol that incorporates the blockchain based smart contracts to remove redundancy in the traditional handover authentication. Our proposed scheme can achieve the mutual authentication and key agreement between vehicles and base stations in 5G wireless networks, while it can largely reduce the cost for the handover authentication at the same time. The formal verification by Scyther indicates that the proposed protocol can resist various malicious attacks. In addition, the performance evaluation results show that the delay incurred by handover authentication can be significantly reduced indicating that the proposed protocol is feasible and holds potential to be used in the deployment of 5G wireless networks.