A green and secure authentication for the 4th generation mobile network

The 4th generation (4G) mobile access network and the core network are evolving towards a secure, fast, and Internet Protocol-based network. With the emergence of next generation battery-powered smart mobile phone and open source application platforms, security and the terminal´s energy consumption have become big issues. Long Term Evolution (LTE) is one of the most popular 4G technologies defined by 3rd Generation Partnership Projects (3GPP). It is observed that the end user requires two authentication steps to access multimedia services. The first is the LTE network layer authentication, and the second is the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) service layer authentication. The authentication steps utilize energy and are carried out using the Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol. This paper proposes an Improved AKA (I-AKA) authentication protocol which authenticates the user on both the network layer and the service layer without double execution the AKA protocol and simplifies the authentication steps. Furthermore, the security and energy consumption were analyzed and the results showed the proposed I-AKA could save up to 81.82% of the terminal´s energy consumption related to authentication with increased security.