Performance Evaluation of PANA Pre-authentication and PANA Context Transfer

The future vision of the wireless networks is coexistence of current existing access networks. The different access networks managed by different operators will be bound together into a single network and the Internet Protocol will be the glue. To fulfill this vision, one of the most challenging parts is to facilitate the authentication phase of the handovers between domains. PANA pre-authentication scheme was designed to carry the authentication information before the actual handover execution from one domain to a subsequent domain. However, the available time to complete this handover can be rather short due to the user´s movement. In this paper, a new approach is presented that can substantially lower the time needed for an inter-domain handover by using context transfer compared to PANA pre-authentication. We describe the approach and show its benefits by means of simulation using the tool OMNET++.