A Novel Pre-Authentication Scheme Based on Fast Channel Switching in IEEE 802.11 WLANs

In the case of a 3G-WLAN interworking architecture, handoff latency is mainly caused by the delays incurred when a mobile station (STA) transfers a current security context to the target access network or establishes connectivity to a new access point (AP). Existing handoff optimization schemes have mostly focused on reducing the scanning time which is to discover nearby access points. Even though the time taken by a mobile STA to authenticate the target APs contributes to the total handoff delay, the schemes to optimize the authentication time have not yet been fully investigated for providing seamless connectivity to mobile users performing handoff in WLANs. As a solution, pre-authentication, a technique performing the authentication of target APs before the completion of the handoff procedure, has attracted considerable attention to reduce the overall delay related with a handoff, which is performed within inter-subnet and/or inter-administrative domain levels. Therefore, in this article, we propose a novel pre-authentication scheme to minimize the handoff delay in 3G-WLAN interworking architecture. The proposed scheme pre-authenticates a new AP directly through a switched channel in a short period of time. Our evaluation shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing authentication schemes defined in the IEEE 802.11 standards in terms of authentication delay, signaling cost, and mobility rate. The proposed mechanism offers an additional advantage in that it is easy to implement and deploy by simply modifying the device driver modules of clients’ WLAN interfaces.