A novel re-authentication scheme based on tickets in wireless local area networks

Fast re-authentication schemes during handover of a mobile station are essential to seamless services for real-time multimedia applications in wireless local area networks. Although much research has been done to reduce re-authentication latency, the schemes developed so far either suffer from heavy burden problems or degrade the security level. In this paper, a novel ticket-based approach is proposed for re-authentication during handover. The mobile station receives handover tickets from the authentication server as a proof of authorization, and it presents the corresponding ticket when associating with a new access point. Our scheme reduces re-authentication delay to the delay of 2-way handshake between a mobile station and an access point. Furthermore, this scheme imposes less burden over the entities compared with other proactive key pre-distribution schemes, while satisfying 802.11i security requirements.