Enhanced Authentication Mechanism for Next Generation Networks

Next generation networks (NGN) is the evolution of the telecommunication core. NGN is a one network that transports all information and services such as voice, data and multimedia from and to access networks. The multimedia services provided to mobile users through different access networks in this paper study refers to WLAN. The user has to execute multi-pass authentication and key agreement (AKA) procedures in order to get access to the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS). This causes overhead on the AAA server and increases the delay of authenticating the user and that is because of unnecessary and repeated procedures and protocols. This paper presents an enhanced one-pass AKA procedure that eliminates the repeated steps without affecting the security level, in addition it reduces the denial of service (DoS) attacks. The presented mechanism has minimal impact on the network infrastructure and functionality and does not require any changes to the existing authentication protocols. This paper investigates the performance improvement and the user authentication cost of the enhanced one-pass over the multi-pass AKA. We used a simple analytic model that illustrates the performance of an enhanced one-pass and a multi-pass AKA. This study identifies the cases in which the enhanced one-pass AKA presents substantial benefits, e.g., when the mobile user has lengthy session time with several handoffs.