Bin Han, Stan Wong, Christian Mannweiler, Marcos Rates Crippa, Hans D. Schotten

• The fifth-generation mobile telecommunication network is expected to support multi-access edge computing (MEC), which intends to distribute computation tasks and services from the central cloud to the edge clouds. Toward ultra-responsive, ultra-reliable, and ultra-low-latency MEC services, the current mobile network security architecture should enable a more decentralized approach for authentication and authorization processes. This paper proposes a novel decentralized authentication architecture that supports flexible and low-cost local authentication with the awareness of context information of network elements such as user equipment and virtual network functions. Based on a Markov model for backhaul link quality as well as a random walk mobility model with mixed mobility classes and traffic scenarios, numerical simulations have demonstrated that the proposed approach is able to achieve a flexible balance between the network operating cost and the MEC reliability.