Dynamic Group Based Authentication Protocol for Machine Type Communications

Abstract

In cellular networks, Machine-Type Communication (MTC) has shown the advantages, including better coverage and lower network deployment cost, which makes it become the hotspot in industry area. However, the current cellular network is designed for human-to-human communication (H2H), and less optimal for machine-to-machine, machine-to-human or human-to-machine applications. One of the most urgent issues, which network operators are currently facing, is MTC related signalling congestion and overload. Especially, when a large co-located MTC group almost simultaneously accesses or periodically transmits, masses authentication data may cause a serious congestion in VLR/SGSN node and overload of link between serving network (SN) and home environment (HE). This paper provides a practical group based authentication and key agreement for MTC roaming scenario. In the group, each MTC device not only shares a secret key with home environment, but also a group secret key with home environment and other MTC devices belong to the same group. Then signalling data is reduced between serving network and home environment, by the MTC device using this group key as an authentication key and authenticating locally. Furthermore, a method of group key update is proposed to suit for dynamic MTC group. Finally, the analysis shows that the proposal can remarkably lower the effort of handling large MTC group, and minimize the change of operator's core network(CN).