A New Scheme of Group-based AKA for Machine Type Communication over LTE Networks

Machine Type Communication (MTC) is considered as one of the most important approaches to the future of mobile communication has attracted more and more attention. To reach the safety of MTC, applications in networks must meet the low power consumption requirements of devices and mass transmission device. When a large number of MTC devices get connected to the network, each MTC device must implement an independent access authentication process according to the 3GPP standard, which will cause serious traffic congestion in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. In this article, we propose a new group access authentication scheme, by which a huge number of MTC devices can be simultaneously authenticated by the network and establish an independent session key with the network respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can achieve robust security and avoid signaling overload on LTE network

M2M Communications for E-Health and Smart Grid: An Industry and Standard Perspective

An overview of several standardization activities for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications is presented, analyzing some of the enabling technologies and applications of M2M in industry sectors such as Smart Grid and e-Health. This summary and overview of the ongoing work in M2M from the industrial and standardization perspective complements the prevalent academic perspective of such publications to date in this field

Security-centric analysis and performance investigation of IEEE 802.16 WiMAX

fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Hierarchical Group Based Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement for Machine Type Communication in LTE and Future 5G Networks

In view of the exponential growth in the volume of wireless data communication among heterogeneous devices ranging from smart phones to tiny sensors across a wide range of applications, 3GPP LTE-A has standardized Machine Type Communication (MTC) which allows communication between entities without any human intervention. The future 5G cellular networks also envisage massive deployment of MTC Devices (MTCDs) which will increase the total number of connected devices hundredfold. This poses a huge challenge to the traditional cellular system processes, especially the traditional Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) mechanism currently used in LTE systems, as the signaling load caused by the increasingly large number of devices may have an adverse effect on the regular Human to Human (H2H) traffic. A solution in the literature has been the use of group based architecture which, while addressing the authentication traffic, has their share of issues. This paper introduces Hierarchical Group based Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement (HGMAKA) protocol to address those issues and also enables the small cell heterogeneous architecture in line with 5G networks to support MTC services. The aggregate Message Authentication Code based approach has been shown to be lightweight and significantly efficient in terms of resource usage compared to the existing protocols, while being robust to authentication message failures, and scalable to heterogeneous network architectures

Group authentication protocols for Internet of Things (IoT) – QoS and Security Properties Evaluation

Trabalho de conclusão de curso (graduação)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade de Tecnologia, 2016.The objective of this work is to provide an overview on group authentication protocols for Internet of Things (IoT) and to propose two new group protocols. Both protocols perform authentication and key agreement among a group of devices and a Mobility Management Entity (MME) and aim performance improvements, ensuring a robust security and anonymity protection. One scheme is based on both Elliptical Curves Diffie-Hellman protocol and bilinear pairing and the other is a lightweight symmetric protocol based on Shamir’s secret. Additionally, both protocols have their performance and security objectives accomplishment analyzed and compared with other works already proposed in the literature. The performance analysis and comparison comprises communication, computational, verification and storage costs. Some of the security features analyzed are forward/backward secrecy (FS/BS), anonymity and resistance to several attacks. Finally, the protocols were formally validated by AVISPA tool

Towards Massive Machine Type Communications in Ultra-Dense Cellular IoT Networks: Current Issues and Machine Learning-Assisted Solutions

The ever-increasing number of resource-constrained Machine-Type Communication (MTC) devices is leading to the critical challenge of fulfilling diverse communication requirements in dynamic and ultra-dense wireless environments. Among different application scenarios that the upcoming 5G and beyond cellular networks are expected to support, such as eMBB, mMTC and URLLC, mMTC brings the unique technical challenge of supporting a huge number of MTC devices, which is the main focus of this paper. The related challenges include QoS provisioning, handling highly dynamic and sporadic MTC traffic, huge signalling overhead and Radio Access Network (RAN) congestion. In this regard, this paper aims to identify and analyze the involved technical issues, to review recent advances, to highlight potential solutions and to propose new research directions. First, starting with an overview of mMTC features and QoS provisioning issues, we present the key enablers for mMTC in cellular networks. Along with the highlights on the inefficiency of the legacy Random Access (RA) procedure in the mMTC scenario, we then present the key features and channel access mechanisms in the emerging cellular IoT standards, namely, LTE-M and NB-IoT. Subsequently, we present a framework for the performance analysis of transmission scheduling with the QoS support along with the issues involved in short data packet transmission. Next, we provide a detailed overview of the existing and emerging solutions towards addressing RAN congestion problem, and then identify potential advantages, challenges and use cases for the applications of emerging Machine Learning (ML) techniques in ultra-dense cellular networks. Out of several ML techniques, we focus on the application of low-complexity Q-learning approach in the mMTC scenarios. Finally, we discuss some open research challenges and promising future research directions.Comment: 37 pages, 8 figures, 7 tables, submitted for a possible future publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

OpenEPC Integration within 5GTN as an NFV proof of concept

Abstract. Gone are the days, when a hardware is changed on every malfunctioning and the whole operation either stays down or load on the replacing hardware becomes too much which ultimately compromises the QoS. The IT industry is mature enough to tackle problems regarding scalability, space utilization, energy consumption, cost, agility and low availability. The expected throughput and network latency with 5G in the cellular Telecommunication Networks seems to be unachievable with the existing architecture and resources. Network Function Virtualization promises to merge IT and Telecommunications in such an efficient way that the expected results could be achieved no longer but sooner. The thesis work examines the compatibility and flexibility of a 3GPP virtual core network in a virtualization platform. The testbed is established on an LTE (Long Term Evolution) based network being already deployed and OpenEPC is added as virtual core network on it. The integration of OpenEPC in 5GTN (5TH Generation Test Network) is discussed in details in the thesis which will give an account of the possibility of implementing such a simulated vEPC (Virtual Evolved Packet Core) in a real network platform. The deployed setup is tested to check its feasibility and flexibility for a platform which could be used for NFV deployment in future. The monitoring of OpenEPC’s individual components while utilizing the major resources within them, forms the primary performance test. The CPU Load and Memory Utilization is tested on different CPU stress levels having a constant data traffic from actual UEs. At the completion of the thesis work, a consensus is built up based on the test results that the test setup can hold number of subscribers to a certain amount without any performance degradation. Moreover, the virtual core network throughput and network latency is also compared to the commercial LTE networks and theoretical maximum values on similar resources to check performance consistency OpenEPC must offer