Securing offloading process within small cell cloud-based mobile networks

Small cells endowed with specific cloud capabilities provide a new and promising approach to offer attractive services, such as cloud services which are still being exploited for offloading computation from a mobile device or for data storing purposes. Within our research, we focus on a typical application of multiple cloud enabled small cells located within a local area network, typically in company premises. The user offloading request is processed by small cells according to their current availability of resources. However, the user equipment does not need to be directly associated with it. Therefore, the transmitted data need to be secured by a different mechanism that ensures end-to-end security and identity of each communicating party in order to prevent various attacks. For that purpose, we propose a hierarchical structure of certificate authorities which is an asymmetric cryptographic scheme based on modified X.509 digital certificates. Beside the previously stated issues, the proposed scheme also decreases computing time needed for certificate validation as well as validation delay introduced by the online certificate status protocol and limits the necessity of communication with the main certificate authority.