Federated 3GPP Mobile Edge Computing Systems: A Transparent Proxy for Third Party Authentication With Application Mobility Support

Asad Ali, Samin Rahman Khan*, Sadman Sakib, Md Shohrab Hossain, Ying Dar Lin

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)35106-35119
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Access
Volume10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022

Keywords

  • 3GPP cellular networks
  • authentication
  • latency
  • Mobile edge computing
  • mobility
  • multi-access edge computing

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