Group-based authentication and key agreement for machine-type communication

Machine-type Communication MTC is a form of data communication which involves one or more entities that do not necessarily need human interaction, which has become the hotspot in industry area. However, current cellular network is less optimal for MTC applications, and now facing some urgent issues, e.g. congestion and overload caused by the access of masses of MTC devices. This paper provides a group-based authentication and key agreement for MTC communications. Besides a secret key shared between Serving Network SN and Home Environment HE, each member also shares a group key with HE and other members of the group. Then authentication signalling could be reduced by using the group key as authentication key and authenticating locally. Furthermore, a method of group key update is proposed to support dynamic MTC group. Finally, analyses show that the proposal can remarkably lower the effort of handling large MTC group.