An Efficient Secure Handover Scheme Supporting Cross-Network Slicing for Multi-Operator Environments
Chun‐I Fan, Zheng Kai-yuan, Yu-Tse Shih, Er-Shuo Zhuang, Jheng-Jia Huang · 2021
The 5thGeneration Mobile Network (5G) possesses the properties of high data rates, reliable network access, low service latency, and support for large amounts of data traffic. With Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN), 5G network environment introduces a new concept: Network Slicing. Each network slice can be created with unique attributes tailored for the needs of each service. However, when users want to use different slicing services, they need to go through the whole authentication process again, leading increased computing costs. Some researchers have proposed new works to solve this issue, but there is still much that can be improved. Therefore, we propose a network slicing handover authentication scheme that satisfies the standards defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project and achieves low time latency by delegating computation overheads to the edge clouds. Furthermore, we incorporate the concepts of the Authentication Handover Module and two-stage authentication in the proposed scheme.