A Secure Seamless Handover Authentication Technique for Wireless LAN

A wireless network contains multiple access points, a long delay during roaming from one access point to another may cause an interruption for streaming real time traffic. Roaming in a wireless local area network (WLAN) generally consists two phases: a) searching for a new best access point and b) performing authentication at new target access point. On account of WLAN architecture, the handoff latency is primarily caused by the delays incurred when a mobile user exchanges a present security context to a target access network or establishes connectivity to a target access point. In this paper, we propose a new fast authentication scheme to support fast handover in IEEE 802.11 wireless network to minimize the delay. It performs mutual authentication between a mobile user and an access point with 2-way handshake and does not require to contact the authentication server for verifying a roaming user or exchanging certificates. Our scheme efficiently performs roaming authentication in terms of authentication delay.