Biblio

Wireless mesh networking (WMN) is a new technology aimed to introduce the benefits of using multi-hop and multi-path to the wireless world. However, the absence of a fast and reliable handoff protocol is a major drawback especially in a technology designed to feature high mobility and scalability. We propose a fast and efficient handoff authentication protocol for wireless mesh networks. It is a token-based authentication protocol using pre-distributed parameters. We provide a performance comparison among our protocol, UFAP, and other protocols including EAP-TLS and EAP-PEAP tested in an actual setup. Performance analysis will prove that our proposed handoff authentication protocol is 250 times faster than EAP-PEAP and 500 times faster than EAP-TLS. The significant improvement in performance allows UFAP to provide seamless handoff and continuous operation even for real-time applications which can only tolerate short delays under 50 ms.