Ticket-based handoff authentication for wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Due to the convenience of deployment and maintenance, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as key techniques to support large-scale wireless coverage in both industrial and academic fields. Secure and seamless handoff is important to support mobility in WMNs. There are many existing works can be adopted to reduce the handoff latency, However, all these schemes require modifications to the original authentication protocols (e.g., different key architectures or trust relationships). In this paper, we propose a design based on ticket to achieve fast and secure handoff in WMNs. By pre-distributing the tickets to mesh client, the mesh client and the target mesh router can authenticate each other and establish temporary connection. Our scheme can be regarded as a supplementary specialized for handoff in WMNs, and no modification is required to the IEEE 802.1x authentication architecture. We achieve seamless handoff by using symmetric key operations and eliminating the involvement of a third party, which significantly reduces the computation and communication overheads. The security and performance analysis shows that our scheme is efficient in terms of security, computation overhead and handoff latency.