A Fast Handover Authentication Mechanism Based on Ticket for IEEE 802.16m

IEEE 802.16 m is now under consideration by the ITU to become the IMT-Advanced standard. However, handover authentication is a critical issue in this area. In this letter, we propose a fast handover authentication mechanism based on ticket for IEEE 802.16 m. The credential ticket of Mobile Station (MS) is issued by the access Base Station (BS) using a multi-BS group key during the initial authentication. When the MS moves from the service BS to a target BS, it can show its ticket to the target BS and this BS can authenticate the MS without communicating with any other third party (e.g., previous BS and authentication server). Our analysis shows that the proposed scheme meets the security requirements in handover authentication semantics and provides robust efficiency in terms of communication overhead and computational cost.