An Improved Authentication Protocol with Less Delay for UMTS Mobile Networks

To provide secure communication for universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) Mobile Networks, authentication and key agreement (AKA) is carried out between the user and the home environment, and the authentication protocol is an important primitive for entity authentication and session keys. The current authentication protocol is giving a reasonable security level. However it is overloading the network with significant signaling traffic and increasing the call setup time. The signaling load and authentication delay are of particular importance for the efficient authentication. In this paper, we will study and analyze the current authentication protocol, and propose an improved scheme. The proposed protocol only requires a little modification based on the current protocol. It reduces the number of messages and requires less traffic, bandwidth between the user and Visited Location Register (VLR). The more apparent improvement is that the proposed scheme is clearly causing less delay, and it can be better used in UMTS networks.