| Summary: | LTE is the enabler of today’s world. Individuals use mobile devices such as
smartphones and tablets over LTE to constantly stream music and videos. Businesses
rely on these mobile devices to roll out their services closer to the customers. As the
use of mobile devices increases, it becomes important to provide consistent user
experience across the network, particularly when the mobile devices are on the move.
One technical challenge is to provide seamless and secure handover as the mobile
devices hop from one cell to another while they are moving. The handover process
used in the current LTE system does not offer the level of speed required by the next generation
cellular network. In this dissertation, the key derivation method used in the
handover process is revisited and improved using a blockchain. This novel approach,
using a blockchain, ensures a higher level of security as well as faster handover
between cells. Unlike today’s LTE system, which holds back all handover operations
until the handover process begins, the essence of the new approach lies on the ability
to securely derive and share the handover keys before the handover process starts,
effectively reducing the delay attributed to the handover process. The dissertation
reviews extensively on the security benefits of mutual authentication and key
establishment in the proposed scheme and demonstrates the performance results using
a custom application written in JavaScript to verify the enhancements.
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