ReHand: Secure Region-Based Fast Handover with User Anonymity for Small Cell Networks in Mobile Communications

Abstract

Due to the fact that the higher density of mobile devices is expected, the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks introduce small cell networks (SCNs) to prevent exhausting radio resources. SCNs improve radio spectrum utilization by deploying more base stations (BSs) in the networks. Even though authenticated key exchange (AKE) is still essential to ensure entity authentication and confidentiality in mobile communications. Besides, user anonymity is required to guarantee the footprints of mobile communications being concealed. However, AKE with user anonymity may increase the latency of communications dramatically in total due to several times more frequency in SCNs. The increase of latency will be more serious when an AKE protocol supports user anonymity, where traceability and revocability to users are necessary. Thus, this paper presents a secure region-based handover scheme (ReHand) with user anonymity and fast revocation for SCNs. ReHand greatly reduces the communication latency when user equipments (UEs) roam between small cells within the region of a macro BS, i.e., eNB, and the computation costs due to the employment of symmetry-based cryptographic operations. Compared to the three related prior arts, ReHand dramatically reduces the latency from 82.92% to 99.99% by region-based secure handover. Nevertheless, this paper demonstrates the security of ReHand by theoretically formal proofs. © 2019 IEEE.