Security for Handover andD2DCommunication in5G HetNets

Abstract

The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) leads the standards for the next‐generation mobile communication technology which is under the development. This is called 5G wireless mobile networks that has become the paradigm to bring not only solutions for the rising demand for huge data traffic but also massively connected devices, such as internet of things (IoT) and new services. Also, 5G is expected to supply the fastest, most reliable network access to support huge data traffic and massively connected nodes with low latency and high throughput. There are different new technologies that are emerging to tackle requirements of the 5G networks, such as Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Software‐Defined Networking (SDN), and Heterogeneous Network (HetNet). However, the new case scenarios and new system architecture of 5G HetNets are vulnerable against various attacks; therefore, we now have the unique opportunity to identify research directions for the next generation based on existing security and privacy issues as well as already proposed security mechanisms or solutions. Hence, this article presents a comprehensive survey on security issues that are happening in handover authentication and device‐to‐device (D2D) communication on 5G HetNets. The article begins with the explanation of the requirements of 5G mobile networks and gives the overall architecture of the 5G and the security architecture of the 5G systems. Subsequently, we focus security features and techniques for handover authentication and D2D group communication which incur a big security challenge in 5G HetNets. Finally, the future directions of handover and D2D security are discussed for 5G HetNets.