Secure and efficient handover protocols for WMNs

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) consist of a wireless infrastructure of mesh routers which are connected to the Internet via mesh gateways. Mesh clients on the other hand connect to these routers. To make full use of the connectivity and services offered by a WMN, users should be able to securely hand over from one router to the next. In particular, keying material has to be supplied to the new router. Handover protocols designed for infrastructure WLAN cannot be directly applied here as they have clearly been designed with a trusted backbone in mind. In this paper we propose three complementary secure, efficient, and practical proactive handover protocols, which are able to cope with the unique characteristics of WMNs such as the wireless infrastructure and untrusted intermediaries.We have also implemented and evaluated our protocols using our WMN testbed and thus show the feasibility of our solution in time critical contexts.