Fast and Secure Handover in WLANs: An Evaluation of the Signaling Overhead

Different re-authentication methods have been proposed to reduce the time needed to complete a handover. If the handover latency is an important criterion, network operators have to take into account a lot of parameters while designing their networks, such as signaling overhead, functional properties or deployability. In this paper, a comparison of several 802.11 re-authentication method signaling overheads is given. Three methods have been evaluated thanks to a mathematical model, which integrates the size of all messages necessary to achieve complete authentications and re-authentications.