A new Standard for securing media independent handover: IEEE 802.21A

When enabling handover between different radio interfaces (e.g., handover from 3G to Wi- Fi), reducing network access authentication latency and securing handover related signaling messages are major challenging problems, amongst many others. The IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards committee has recently finished its standardization work in this area by defining the IEEE std 802.21a-2012. The mechanisms introduced in this standard are aimed to protect the IEEE std 802.21-2008 messages and services and to reduce handover latency by introducing the concept of proactive authentication. We provide a comprehensive survey of this standard and describe how the defined mechanisms can be used to reduce the overall latency during handover between access networks using heterogenous radio interfaces.