A proxy based approach for pre-authentication in media independent vertical handover

With the proliferation of multiple wireless technologies and smartphones with enhanced radio capabilities, it has become imperative to deliver services that can work seamlessly across heterogeneous networks. As smartphones advance in their capabilities, there is an increasing adoption of services with realtime delivery constraints (e.g. video telephony, streaming). In a heterogeneous network environment, latencies during handoff across networks becomes a critical impediment for delivery of real-time services. An important contributor to the hand-off latency is the authentication of a mobile node with the target domain. In this paper, we propose a proxy based approach to reduce the pre-authentication latency which is also designed to operate across domains with minimal trust relationship. Our approach targets latencies attributable to computation and over-the-air communication. Our solution, based on IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover and using EAP-TLS as the preferred authentication scheme, provides predictable performance guarantees under widely varying network conditions.