PLA-MIH: A Secure IEEE802.21 Signaling Scheme

As a logical extension of today´s highly mobile lifestyle comes the need for high-speed wireless broadband network access. This need was quickly recognized and addressed by the research community with the development of several wireless network technologies. Co-existence of such multiple technologies in the market necessitated a signaling scheme for mobile devices to change the point of attachment from one technology to another, which has recently been addressed by the IEEE standard 802.21 or media independent handover. However, the security perspective of 802.21 has largely been ignored by the specification and no real-world deployment is possible without a proper defense mechanism. Although several attempts to solve the problem has been made, most of them suffers from excessive overhead of signaling. This paper proposes a novel scheme to transport 802.21 signal over a secure network layer protocol named PLA that has built in hop-by-hop security mechanism. This ensures very strong security of the signaling framework without incurring much overhead. Furthermore, the threats identified by IEEE workgroup 802.21a has also been addressed by the solution.