A Ticket-based Re-authentication Scheme for Fast Handover in Wireless Local Area Networks

Fast re-authentication schemes for mobile stations are essential during handover between access points in wireless local area networks. Although lots of research resources have been put into the reduction of re-authentication latency, these schemes developed so far seem to either suffer from heavy overhead or have weak security. This paper proposes a novel ticket-based approach to deal with the problem. The mobile station receives handover tickets from the authentication server as a proof of authorization, and it presents the corresponding ticket when associating with a new access point. The proposed scheme reduces handover delay during the re-authentication phase to the delay of 2-way handshake between an access point and a mobile station. Furthermore, this scheme gives less burden over the entities comparing with other proactive key pre-distribution schemes while satisfying 802.11i security requirements.