Analytical model for authentication transmission overhead between entities in mobile networks

This paper analyses the authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol for UMTS mobile networks, where a new authentication protocol which is able to reduce the network traffic and signaling message between entities, and consequently the bottleneck at authentication centre is avoided, this is achieved by reducing the number of messages between mobile and authentication centre, and then reducing the authentication times and setup time as well as improveing authentication efficiency as shown in numerical analysis and simulation results. In this paper we propose dynamic length (L) for an array for authentication vector (AV). This required designing new technique to predict the numbers of records in AV in each authentication data request depending on the to arrival rate of authentication events and residence time of MS in VLR/SGSN. The proposed AKA with dynamic L for AV is compared with the current AKA with fixed length for AV.