Authentication Overhead in Wireless Networks

Access authentication is an indispensable component in wireless mobile networks for providing network resilience and ensuring secure communications. Normally, more complicated secure algorithms will consume more resources, including bandwidth, power, computation time and storage space. This will result in higher authentication overhead, which, however, is not fully studied in the literature. In this paper, we will analyze and exam the authentication overhead in wireless networks. The number of user authentication request (UAR) is formulated as the performance metric to demonstrate the authentication traffic load. The probability mass function and the average number of UAR are developed. In deriving the formula, Registration Area residence time is relaxed to follow a general probability density function. In addition, an efficient recursive algorithm is developed to significantly reduce the computation complexity. Numerical examples are presented to investigate the interaction between authentication overhead and the key tele-traffic parameters. The analysis has been validated by the simulation.