Federated 3GPP Mobile Edge Computing Systems: A Transparent Proxy for Third Party Authentication with Application Mobility Support

TL;DR

This paper introduces FS3A, a transparent proxy mechanism for federated MEC systems that enables seamless third-party authentication and application mobility, significantly reducing latency and service interruption during roaming.

Contribution

It proposes a novel FS3A proxy that facilitates token reuse and state prefetching, enhancing mobility and authentication efficiency without architectural changes.

Findings

Token reuse reduces authentication latency by up to 65%.

State prefetching decreases application mobility latency by up to 91%.

Overall, service interruption time is reduced by 33%.

Abstract

Multi-Access or Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is being deployed by 4G/5G operators to provide computational services at lower latencies. Federating MECs across operators expands capability, capacity, and coverage but gives rise to two issues - third-party authentication and application mobility - for continuous service during roaming without re-authentication. In this work, we propose a Federated State transfer and 3rd-party Authentication (FS3A) mechanism that uses a transparent proxy to transfer the information of both authentication and application state across operators to resolve these issues. The FS3A proxy is kept transparent, with virtual counterparts, to avoid any changes to the existing MEC and cellular architectures. FS3A provides users with a token, when authenticated by an MEC, which can be reused across operators for faster authentication. Prefetching of subscription and state is also proposed to further reduce the authentication and application mobility latencies. We evaluated FS3A on an OpenAirInterface (OAI)-based testbed and the results show that token reuse and subscription prefetching reduce the authentication latency by 53-65%, compared to complete re-authentication, while state prefetching reduces application mobility latency by 51-91%, compared to no prefetching. Overall, FS3A reduces the service interruption time by 33%, compared to no token reuse and prefetching.