A Universal Lightweight Authentication Scheme Based on Delegation Mechanism in Heterogeneous Networks

Due to the rapid growth of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) and cellular technology, integrating WLAN access networks into mobile cellular networks has become one of many important research issues. Because each technology has its own limitations in terms of coverage and bandwidth, the current trend is to integrate different but complementary wireless access technologies and make inter-operation among different administrative domains possible. In this paper, we propose a lightweight authentication protocol to integrate WLAN and cellular technology, our protocol using pre-shared secret key and temporary identity (TID) to reduce the computation cost on mobile stations and protect mobile stations privacy.