Title: Decentralised secure handover in IMS-based networks

Authors: Wei-Kuo Chiang; Po-Chiang Kuo

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi 621, Taiwan ' Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi 621, Taiwan

Abstract: This paper proposes a decentralised secure handover scheme for service continuity in IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)-based networks: Decentralised Service Continuity (DSC). The novelty of the DSC is that the Proxy Call and Session Control Function (P-CSCF) in IMS is enhanced as a distributed Application Server (AS) with third-party call control (3PCC) for handling the handover. Moreover, the DSC integrates a secure context transfer mechanism to the P-CSCF to get the context information of a newly attached User Equipment (UE) and guarantee the confidentiality and the integrity. The DSC could shorten the IMS transmission latency significantly and reduce UE power consumption, as compared with the standard IMS-based service continuity and the Mid-Session Macro-Mobility (MSM).

Keywords: decentralised handover; secure context transfer; 3PCC; third-party call control; IMS; handover security; IP multimedia subsystems; service continuity; network security; transmission latency; energy consumption.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2012.048624

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2012 Vol.10 No.3, pp.137 - 148

Received: 07 Aug 2010
Accepted: 20 Dec 2010
Published online: 23 Aug 2012 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article