A New Roaming Authentication Framework For Wireless Communication

Abstract

Roaming authentication protocol is widely used in wireless network which can enable a seamless service for the mobile users. However, the classical approach requires the home server’s participation during the authentication between the mobile user and the foreign server. So the more the roaming requests are performed the heavier burden will be on the home server. In this paper, we propose a new roaming authentication framework for wireless communication without the home server’s participation. The new roaming authentication protocol in the new framework takes advantage of the ID-based cryptography and provides user anonymity. It has good performance compared with the roaming authentication protocols whose authentication do not need the home server’s participation in terms of security and computation costs. Moreover, a new User-to-User authentication protocol in the new framework is also present. All the authentications proposed in this paper can be regarded as a common construction and can be applied to various kinds of wireless networks such as Cellular Networks, Wireless Mesh Networks and Vehicle Networks.