Group Handover for Drone Base Stations

TL;DR

This paper proposes a secure, efficient group handover protocol for drone-mounted base stations (UxNB) that enhances authentication and reduces resource consumption during high-density user scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel authentication scheme for UxNB that aligns with LTE and 5G standards, eliminating credential sharing and enabling fast, secure group handovers.

Findings

The proposed protocol ensures secure UxNB authentication.

It reduces communication overhead during handover.

Group handover operations are completed quickly.

Abstract

The widespread use of new technologies such as the Internet of things (IoT) and machine type communication(MTC) forces an increase on the number of user equipments(UEs) and MTC devices that are connecting to mobile networks. Inherently, as the number of UEs inside a base station's (BS) coverage area surges, the quality of service (QoS) tends to decline. The use of drone-mounted BS (UxNB) is a solution in places where UEs are densely populated, such as stadiums. UxNB emerges as a promising technology that can be used for capacity injection purposes in the future due to its fast deployment. However, this emerging technology introduces a new security issue. Mutual authentication, creating a communication channel between terrestrial BS and UxNB, and fast handover operations may cause security issues in the use of UxNB for capacity injection. This new protocol also suggests performing UE handover from terrestrial to UxNB as a group. To the best of the authors' knowledge, there is no authentication solution between BSs according to LTE and 5G standards. The proposed scheme provides a solution for the authentication of UxNB by the terrestrial BS. Additionally, a credential sharing phase for each UE in handover is not required in the proposed method. The absence of a credential sharing step saves resources by reducing the number of communications between BSs. Moreover, many UE handover operations are completed in concise time within the proposed group handover method.