Unified and fast handover authentication based on link signatures in 5G SDN-based HetNet

Existing handover authentication schemes are implemented in the upper layer through cryptographic techniques with different protocols and parameters involved under different handover scenarios, introducing high latency and complexity especially in the next generation (5G) highly heterogeneous network (HetNet). The authors propose to introduce wireless link signatures decided by users' locations as handover authentication data to achieve unified and fast handover authentication at the physical layer in 5G software defined networking-based HetNet. Specifically, the unique wireless channel characteristics between a user and the serving access point (AP) are extracted as the secure context information (SCI) and transferred to the target AP. The latter determines whether the user is the legitimate one who has already been authenticated according to the received SCI. They then analyse the authentication performance relating to multiple attributes and results demonstrate that the authentication strength can be adaptively adjusted. Furthermore, they find that optimum performance can be achieved by setting a proper decision threshold and derive the sub-optimal performance by iterative search. Lastly, analysis and simulations on latency and overhead compared with existing ones are conducted and results prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.