An authentication scheme for fast handover between WiFi access points

In this paper, we propose an authentication scheme that is designed to reduce the authentication delay during a WiFi handover process. We observe that the largest part of the delay is due to the remote communications between the ac- cess point and the AAA server that authorizes the access to the network. In order to eliminate remote communications, our scheme uses pre-authorization, and it pre-distributes au- thentication information to the access points that are the po- tential targets of a future handover. This ensures that only local communications (between the mobile station and the access point) take place during the handover itself. We de- scribe the design of our scheme, as well as report on a proof- of-concept implementation. Our validation results show that our scheme breaks the dependency of the authentication de- lay on the round-trip time between the access point and the AAA server. This makes our scheme applicable in real time applications such as telephony and video streaming for WiFi users.