Abstract
Wireless local area network (WLAN) has grown in popularity recently due to the characteristics of wireless access and mobility. Multimedia and voice applications on WLAN usually are required to access network resource without interruption. In order to maintain high quality of communication for mobile users employing these applications, WLAN system must provide the ability of fast handoff across different access point (AP). However, the WPA authentication requires much time such that WLAN is difficult to support the fast handoff. In this paper, we propose a secure accelerated authentication scheme based on refined neighbor graph. Through key pre-agreement between each mobile station (STA) and neighbor APs in advance and the reduction of handover authentication process, our protocol can reduce significantly the authentication latency as user re-associates with another AP. Moreover, a refined neighbor graph is proposed to determine the APs which can negotiate key material with STA and generate cipher key in a proactive fashion. Instead of picking all neighbor APs on Neighbor Graph, this scheme only selects certain APs where the STA is most likely to roams further to anticipate in key pre-generation prior to subsequent handoff. Consequently, our scheme can minimize efficiently network traffic load that results from key pre-agreement while providing the fast authentication of handoff.