TEASE: A novel Tunnel-based sEcure Authentication SchemE to support smooth handoff in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks

Abstract

With the growing popularity of WiFi-based devices, WiFi-based wireless networks have received a great deal of interest in the wireless networks community. However, due to the limited transmission range of WiFi-based networks, mobile users have to switch their associated access points constantly to maintain continuing communications during their movement. The process of switching access points is called handoff. Handoff management is a key service in mobile networks, because providing seamless roaming in wireless networks is mandatory for supporting real-time applications in a mobile environment, such as VoIP, online games, and eConference. Security is another important issue in network communications, and to prevent possible attacks, authentication is required during the handoff process to guarantee the reliability of mobile clients and access points. In this paper, we propose a novel authentication scheme to achieve a smooth handoff in WiFi-based networks, which we refer to as TEASE. A tunnel is introduced to forward data packets between the new access point and the original reliable access point. The processing of a complete secure authentication and the transmitting of data between mobile terminals and their correspondence nodes can go on simultaneously. The security of handoff is achieved without increasing overhead to authentication servers, and handoff latency can be minimized to support seamless roaming. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme reduces significantly the communication interruption time and generates low packet loss ratio, and our method is suitable to be used for secure handoff in real-time applications.