An Integrated Handover Authentication for FMIPv6 Over Heterogeneous Access Link Technologies

This paper proposes an integrated handover authentication for NGN equipped with FMIPv6-based IP mobility over various kinds of access links. In ITU-T, an integrated authentication model has been introduced to support network attachment with mobility in NGN. Since existing studies for handover authentication have focused on the link layer or network layer respectively, there are additional authentication overhead such as duplicated authentication procedures and authentication messages delivery cost. The proposed integrated handover authentication contributes to reducing complexity of the authentication procedure and to enhancing the efficiency of it by means of the combined key management architecture; a mobile node generates a handover key to transfer it to the next access router through the AAA server, and hierarchical key management scheme addresses the locality of movement to authenticate the mobile node at the link layer. The evaluation of the handover authentication costs shows that it reduces the average number of handover authentication events and the authentication message delivery cost during moves in mobile networks. Also, the security aspects of the proposed scheme are discussed.