Reliable Distributed Authentication in Multi-Access Mobile Edge Computing

The fifth generation (5G) mobile telecommunication network is expected to support multi-access mobile edge computing (MEC), which intends to distribute computation tasks and services from the central cloud to the edge clouds. Towards ultraresponsive, ultra-reliable and ultra-low-latency MEC services, the current mobile network security architecture should enable more decentralized approach for authentication and authorization process. This paper proposes a novel distributed authentication architecture that supports flexible, intelligent and low-cost local authentication with the awareness of network elements, e.g. user equipment, virtual network functions etc., context information.