Provisioning Fog Services to 3GPP Subscribers: Authentication and Application Mobility

TL;DR

This paper introduces novel proxy-based authentication and application mobility solutions for federated 3GPP MEC and fog computing, significantly reducing latency and improving service continuity during handovers.

Contribution

It proposes two new methods, PS3A and TSP3A, that enable seamless authentication and application mobility without architectural changes, validated through implementation on a testbed.

Findings

TSP3A reduces application mobility time by 40-52% compared to PS3A.

Both methods significantly lower service interruption latency by over 82%.

Authentication times range from 0.345 to 2.858 seconds under various loads.

Abstract

Multi-Access Edge computing (MEC) and Fog computing provide services to subscribers at low latency. There is a need to form a federation among 3GPP MEC and fog to provide better coverage to 3GPP subscribers. This federation gives rise to two issues - third-party authentication and application mobility - for continuous service during handover from 3GPP MEC to fog without re-authentication. In this paper, we propose: 1) a proxy-based state transfer and third-party authentication (PS3A) that uses a transparent proxy to transfer the authentication and application state information, and 2) a token-based state transfer and proxy-based third-party authentication (TSP3A) that uses the proxy to transfer the authentication information and tokens to transfer the application state from 3GPP MEC to the fog. The proxy is kept transparent with virtual counterparts, to avoid any changes to the existing 3GPP MEC and fog architectures. We implemented these solutions on a testbed and results show that PS3A and TSP3A provide authentication within 0.345-2.858s for a 0-100 Mbps proxy load. The results further show that TSP3A provides application mobility while taking 40-52% less time than PS3A using state tokens. TSP3A and PS3A also reduce the service interruption latency by 82.4% and 84.6%, compared to the cloud-based service via tokens and prefetching.