Practical secure and fast handoff framework for pervasive Wi-Fi access

Seamless handoff is crucial for providing pervasive wireless access especially to support time-sensitive applications in 802.11i security enhanced WLAN, but it introduces large authentication delay to provide advanced security during a handoff. In order to reduce the authentication delay, the IEEE 802.11 work group has defined a pre-authentication scheme; however, the defined scheme works in the MAC layer and does not work in the network layer in IP routing-based multi-domain networks. In this study, the authors proposed a practical secure and fast handoff framework, called V2V, which not only extends the 802.11i pre-authentication scheme to overcome the above limitations, but also supports pre-configuration with dynamic host configuration protocol to reduce the handoff delay further. A prototype of the V2V system is implemented and the testing results show that one can reduce the overall handoff delay, including association, authentication, IP configuration and mobile IP location update, to no more than 50 ms, which can support most time-sensitive applications such as VoIP.