TY - JOUR
T1 - Federated 3GPP Mobile Edge Computing Systems
T2 - A Transparent Proxy for Third Party Authentication With Application Mobility Support
AU - Ali, Asad
AU - Rahman Khan, Samin
AU - Sakib, Sadman
AU - Hossain, Md Shohrab
AU - Lin, Ying Dar
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2013 IEEE.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Multi-Access or Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is being deployed by 4G/5G operators to provide computational services at lower latencies. Federating MECs across operators expands capability, capacity, and coverage but gives rise to two issues for continuous service during roaming without re-authentication - third-party authentication and application mobility. In this work, we propose a Federated State transfer and 3rd-party Authentication (FS3A) mechanism that uses a transparent proxy to transfer the information of both authentication and application state across operators to resolve these issues. The FS3A proxy is kept transparent with virtual counterparts to avoid any changes to existing MEC and cellular architectures. FS3A provides users with a token which, when authenticated by an MEC, can be reused across operators for faster authentication. Prefetching of subscription and state is also proposed to further reduce authentication and application mobility latencies. We evaluated FS3A on an OpenAirInterface (OAI)-based testbed and the results show that token reuse and subscription prefetching reduce the authentication latency by 53-65%, compared to complete re-authentication, while state prefetching reduces application mobility latency by 51-91%, compared to no prefetching. Overall, FS3A reduces the service interruption time by 33%, compared to no token reuse and prefetching.
AB - Multi-Access or Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is being deployed by 4G/5G operators to provide computational services at lower latencies. Federating MECs across operators expands capability, capacity, and coverage but gives rise to two issues for continuous service during roaming without re-authentication - third-party authentication and application mobility. In this work, we propose a Federated State transfer and 3rd-party Authentication (FS3A) mechanism that uses a transparent proxy to transfer the information of both authentication and application state across operators to resolve these issues. The FS3A proxy is kept transparent with virtual counterparts to avoid any changes to existing MEC and cellular architectures. FS3A provides users with a token which, when authenticated by an MEC, can be reused across operators for faster authentication. Prefetching of subscription and state is also proposed to further reduce authentication and application mobility latencies. We evaluated FS3A on an OpenAirInterface (OAI)-based testbed and the results show that token reuse and subscription prefetching reduce the authentication latency by 53-65%, compared to complete re-authentication, while state prefetching reduces application mobility latency by 51-91%, compared to no prefetching. Overall, FS3A reduces the service interruption time by 33%, compared to no token reuse and prefetching.
KW - 3GPP cellular networks
KW - authentication
KW - latency
KW - Mobile edge computing
KW - mobility
KW - multi-access edge computing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85127530671&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3162851
DO - 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3162851
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85127530671
SN - 2169-3536
VL - 10
SP - 35106
EP - 35119
JO - IEEE Access
JF - IEEE Access
ER -