Design and Analysis of Improved GSM Authentication Protocol for Roaming Users

In this paper, we improve the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) authentication protocol to reduce the signaling loads on the network. The proposed protocol introduces a notion of the enhanced user profile containing a few of VLR IDs for the location areas where a mobile user is most likely to visit. We decrease the authentication costs for roaming users by exploiting the enhanced user profile. Our protocol is analyzed with regard to efficiency and is compared with the original protocol.