Managing Handover Authentication in Big-domain Wireless Environment

Mobility management is the key feature of wireless network. When the mobile node roams from the home network to the foreign network, the foreign network access server usually does not have the security material of the mobile node, and can not authenticate the mobile node by itself. Thus the three-party authentication is used, and the foreign network access server consults the home authentication server of the mobile node for authentication (usually through the foreign authentication server). However, this sort of authentication will lead to a long latency. With the wide deployment of latency sensitive services in wireless network, the handover authentication latency becomes more and more flagrant. Currently, many standards organizations are working on this issue, and they defined a lot of protocols for optimizing the handover authentication procedure. These protocols mainly include the fast re-authentication protocol, the pre-authentication protocol and the context transfer based authentication protocol. However, current protocols will put a heavy burden on the authentication server in big domain, and thus add a long latency to the handover authentication procedure. This paper presents an elliptic curve based authenticated key agreement protocol with mutual authentication property to address this problem.