Performance evaluation of current and emerging authentication schemes for future 3GPP network architectures

One of the key issues in recent mobile telecommunication is to increase the scalability of current packet data networks. A challenging topic of scalability is the efficient handling of rapidly growing Machine-type communication, which comes along with the requirement of low-cost network attachment and re-attachment procedures. In this paper we present the results of a comprehensive testbed-based performance evaluation on a set of authentication schemes over "centralized", "distributed" and "flat" mobile network architecture alternatives in terms of computational cost, memory utilization, authentication delay, and signalling overhead. The aim of our measurement and analysis is to facilitate decision making on authentication scheme selection in future mobile networks and in Wireless Personal Area Networks. We also show that the optimal distribution level of the network architecture is "distributed" with respect to the authentication delay. The studied authentication schemes seem to hinder seamless handover provision in case of frequent gateway changes, except the Host Identity Protocol-based Diet Exchange extended with 3GPP Authentication and Key Agreement authentication scheme over Wi-Fi access. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.