Abstract
User mobility in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs is ever increasing due to wireless technological advances, the recent popularity of portable devices and the desire for voice and multimedia applications. These applications, however, require very fast and secure handoffs among base stations to maintain the quality of the connections. Re-authentication during handoff procedures causes a long handoff latency which affects the fluidity and service quality of interactive real-time multimedia applications such as VoIP. Minimizing the re-authentication latency is crucial in order to support real-time multimedia applications on public wireless IP network. In this paper, we propose two fast re-authentication methods based on the predictive authentication mechanism defined by IEEE 802.11i security group. We compare our proposed methods to already existing ones. We have implemented these methods in an experimental test-bed using freeware and commodity 802.11 hardware. Conducted measurements show significant latency reductions compared to other proposed solutions.