Low-delay Secure Handover for Space-air-ground Integrated Networks

Recently, space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) has been widely concerned which satisfies the emerging requirement of ubiquitous high-rate wireless communication services. Due to the high mobility of satellites and aircraft in SAGIN, user handover occurs frequently. Fast and secure handover is essential to ensure the global seamless coverage of SAGIN. Existing studies mainly focus on improving the authentication security during handover process and reducing the signaling and computation overhead. However, no one optimizes the handover delay with a given security requirement in SAGIN. In this paper, we propose a new handover scheme based on pre-authentication and security context transfer, and optimize the selection of satellite nodes to ensure fast and secure handoffs. Simulation results show that our scheme algorithm reduces the handover delay by 16.92% compared with baseline algorithm.