Improved AKA Mechanism for 3G Mobile Network

Abstract

Since many mobile network operators have roaming agreements with foreign operators, users can often continue to use their mobile phones when they travel to other countries. To survey of the existing 3G authentication and key agreement (AKA) mechanism, we can discovery that the VLP/SGSN must store an ordered array of n quintet authentication vectors for each mobile station. These authentication vectors result in several drawbacks, such as the storage overhead in VLR/SGSN, communication bandwidth consumption between VLR/SGSN and HLR/AuC. In this paper, we propose a novel 3G AKA mechanism to solve all of the above drawbacks without changing the existing 3G architecture.