Enabling Pervasiveness by Seamless Inter-domain Handover: Performance Study of PANA Pre-authentication

Pervasive wireless networking requires continuous connection to the Internet while moving from one administration domain to another. To enable continuous connection seamless handover has to be ensured. A concept to ensure seamless handover is the make-before-break approach which can be achieved by performing the pre-authentication in the new domain while maintaining connection to current domain. The duration of the authentication is critical for the handover process because if the mobile nodes move very fast the remaining amount of time of connection to the current domain can become very limited. Therefore, it is a vital issue for seamless mobility to study the authentication performance of a pre-authentication framework. In this paper we model an authentication infrastructure and consider a scenario in which a high number of nodes handover to a new administration domain. The simulation of the authentication process shows the relation between authentication performance and traffic intensity. Furthermore we identify some critical points and potential bottlenecks of this pre-authentication approach.