This paper presents an authentication and key agreement protocol to streamline communication activities for a group of mobile stations (MSs) roaming from the same home network (HN) to a serving network (SN). In such a roaming scenario, conventional schemes require the SN to interact with the HN for authenticating respective MSs, at the cost of repeated message exchanges and communication delay. Instead, in our design, when the first MS of a group visits, the SN performs full authentication with the concerned HN and thereby obtains authentication information for the MS and other members. Thus when any other MS of the same group visits, the SN can authenticate locally without subsequent involvement of the HN, so as to simplify protocol operations. We will show that our scheme does not trade performance for security and robustness to the extent that security requirements are unduly weakened. Both qualitative and quantitative discussions indicate that our proposed scheme lends itself to pragmatic settings.

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Abstract-While mesh networking is gaining momentum with widespread application, we are concerned with fast handoff in a secure mesh environment. To this end, this paper presents a means in the context of IEEE 802.11s of letting a mesh portal act as an IEEE 802.1X authenticator to reduce costly IEEE 802.1X authentication processes during handoff. Our approach is developed for alignment with IEEE 802.11s and 802.11i, keeping protocols at the station side operable with no changes. As another strength, our design applies to generic multihop wireless networks. Both analytical and simulation modeling are conducted to evaluate our scheme as well. Performance results show that our approach reduces handoff delay by up to 268% or achieves comparable performance resulting from the counterpart IEEE 802.11i scheme with high likelihood of 70%-85% successful preauthentication. Moreover, our performance analysis suggests an optimal number of access points managed by one mesh portal in a network. Qualitative and quantitative discussions indicate that our approach is applicable in pragmatic settings.Index Terms-Fast handoff, IEEE 802.11i, IEEE 802.11s, mesh network, random walk model, security domain.

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