A group-based authentication and key agreement for MTC in LTE networks

Machine Type Communication (MTC), as one of the most important communication approaches in the future mobile communication, has drawn more and more attention. To meet the requirements of low power consumption of devices and mass device transmission is the key issue to achieve MTC applications security in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. When a large number of MTC devices simultaneously connect to the network, each MTC device needs to implement an independent access authentication process according to the current third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard, which will cause a severe signaling congestion in the LTE network. In this paper, we propose a group-based access authentication scheme, by which a good deal of MTC devices can be simultaneously authenticated by the network and establish an independent session key with the network respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can achieve robust security with desirable efficiency and avoid the signaling overload over the LTE networks.