Increasing performance of authentication in universal mobile telecommunication system
Maryam Mohammadi Avarzaman, Ahmad Salahi · 2009
For secure communication, in universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS) architecture, Authentication and Key Agreement functions (AKA) are utilized to identify and authenticate a mobile station (MS) and validate the service request type to ensure that the user is authorized to use the particular network services. This paper analyzes the current AKA protocol for UMTS mobile networks. Then, we propose a new protocol. In our proposed protocol, the mobile station is authenticated using the secret key and the authentication result is computed first in the mobile SIM (Service Identity Module) card then it is sent to the authentication center (AuC) for verification and validation. The proposed authentication protocol preserved the same security as such as the security available in the current UMTS. In the proposed protocol, the authentication time delay, signaling traffic are minimized and the number of signaling messages are reduced between the mobile networks entities. The simulation results show that the authentication delay and current load transaction messages between entities and bandwidth are minimized as compared to current protocol. Therefore, the performance and the authentication delay time have been improved significantly.