Secured and Seamless Handoff in Wireless Fourth Generation Systems

Satisfying quality of service (QoS) and security requirements is one of the main goals of the wireless fourth generation (4G) systems, which will integrate a multitude of different heterogeneous networks including cellular networks second generation, third generation, wireless local area networks, Bluetooth, etc. In this paper, first we introduce a novel wireless fourth generation architecture which improves cellular network capacity by reducing interference level. Second, we propose a novel approach to secure and provide seamless handoff. The proposed protocol employs mutual authentication between a mobile node and a visited access network (VAN) that is performed first by invoking the mobile node home access network (HAN) then locally without contacting the HAN.