A Novel Group-Based Handover Authentication Scheme with Privacy Preservation for Mobile WiMAX Networks

Abstract

This letter proposes an efficient group-based handover authentication scheme for mobile WiMAX networks. When the first Mobile Station (MS) of the handover group moves from the service Base Station (BS) to a target BS, the service BS transmits all the handover group members security context to the target BS. Thus the rest of the MSs in the same handover group can bypass the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) and the security context transfer phases to directly perform the handover authentication, which obviously reduces handover latency. Moreover, the proposed scheme not only meets the essential security requirements in handover authentication semantics (such as mutual authentication and resisting the domino effect) but also achieves privacy preservation.