Measurement and Analysis of Handover Latencies in IEEE 802.11i Secured Networks

The purpose of the IEEE 802.11i standard is to endue wireless networks with advanced security by leveraging mature and proven security technologies. The concept of a Robust Secure Network (RSN) as a long-term security architecture was defined in order to provide confidentiality of data being transferred over the wireless medium as well as to provide mutual authentication between mobile stations and the network infrastructure. Nonetheless, security provisioning is indubitable time and resource consuming, which poses a problem as far as meeting quality of service demands of forthcoming delay-critical applications (e.g. Voice over WLAN) is concerned. The main objective of this research is to measure and analyze how currently deployed mobile devices perform when joining the RSN as defined by the IEEE 802.11i security amendment. Furthermore, we investigate various state-of-the-art implementations of IEEE 802.11i among different mobile devices providing the answer to what to expect on performance sacrifice by utilizing link-layer protection of IEEE 802.11i. As a result of this work, we find that the price to pay for the IEEE 802.11 security greatly varies among different devices, starting from low latencies such as ≈19 ms up to ≈330 ms and interestingly, computational stronger clients are not a priori the winners.