Fast and secure handover into visited WLAN networks

Abstract

Generally, the re-authentication procedure in a visited network causes a large delay during a secure handover that always involves communication with the home network. Most existing solutions are based on pre-authentication between the different domains, which needs to statically build the roaming agreement between each pair of domains, and cannot support dynamic and flexible cooperation for them. In this paper, we propose a fast re-authentication scheme, based on an authentication token mechanism to reduce the secure handover delay. The authentication token is issued by the home authentication server. The proposed protocol eliminates the need for communication between the target and the user's home networks for credentials verification. Numerical results obtained from a series of simulations show that the proposed scheme enhances handover parameters such as authentication latency and handover blocking probability. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media.