TTP Based Privacy Preserving Inter-WISP Roaming Architecture for Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks

We propose a novel inter-WISP roaming architecture based on trusted third party (TTP) and partially blind signature technique in wireless metropolitan area networks (WMAN). The proposed architecture aims to not only greatly improve user privacy and identity anonymity even in the presence of cooperation between the wireless Internet service provider (WISPs) and the TTP, but also dramatically reduce the required size of central database devised to minimize any possible service abuse. In addition, an efficient billing scheme among mobile users (MUs), WISPs and TTP, is introduced to address billing issues associated with roaming. Moreover, a localized inter-WISP authentication scheme is also proposed to support seamless handoff. Detailed analysis on a number of important performance metrics, such as computation time, handoff latency and power consumption, is conducted to verify the performance of the proposed schemes.