SEIP: Secure and seamless IP communications for group-oriented machine to machine communications

The main requirements of machine to machine (M2M) communication in 5G include support of a massive number of low-data-rate devices and very-low-latency data transfer. Addressing these requirements in 5G requires new methods and in this paper we focus on one of the paramount issues, i.e., secure and seamless IP communications for group-oriented M2M communications. We consider a heterogeneous network architecture based on 3GPP standard, in which the handover occurs between E-UTRAN and Non-3GPP access network. We first propose an improved Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) protocol, and further implement the improved PMIPv6 associated with the group-based lightweight authentication scheme to achieve secure and seamless IP communications, named SEIP, which improves handover latency, packet loss, and signaling overhead. Particularly, SEIP performs access authentication process before IP layer (L3) and link layer (L2) handover to reduce handover delay. In addition, it uses packet buffering and forwarding mechanisms to reduce packet loss during the handover period. SEIP can not only fulfill security requirements in previous protocols, but also can successfully resist some sophisticated attacks, such as redirection, DoS attacks, etc. The results of performance analysis illustrate that SEIP achieves better performance in terms of signaling cost on wireless link, handover latency and packet loss compared to several other schemes.