Provisioning Fog Services to 3GPP Subscribers: Authentication and Application Mobility

Multi-Access Edge computing (MEC) and Fog computing provide services to subscribers at low latency. There is a need to form a federation among 3GPP MEC and fog to provide better coverage to 3GPP subscribers. This federation gives rise to two issues—third-party authentication and application mobility—for continuous service during handover from 3GPP MEC to fog without re-authentication. In this paper, we propose: 1) a proxy-based state transfer and third-party authentication (PS3A) that uses a transparent proxy to transfer the authentication and application state information, and 2) a token-based state transfer and proxy-based third-party authentication (TSP3A) that uses the proxy to transfer the authentication information and tokens to transfer the application state from 3GPP MEC to the fog. The proxy is kept transparent with virtual counterparts, to avoid any changes to the existing 3GPP MEC and fog architectures. We implemented these solutions on a testbed and results show that PS3A and TSP3A provide authentication within 0.345–2.858s for a 0–100 Mbps proxy load. The results further show that TSP3A provides application mobility while taking 40–52% less time than PS3A using state tokens. TSP3A and PS3A also reduce the service interruption latency by 82.4% and 84.6%, compared to the cloudbased service via tokens and prefetching.