Fast Authentication for Mobile Hosts in Wireless Mesh Networks

We aim at extending IEEE 802.11s standards to implement fast hand-off to support real-time applications such as VoIP and audio/video conferencing. We propose a novel trust model that represents the trust relationships among the entities of a WMN, and new authentication protocols based on that model. A client and a mesh access point (MAP) mutually authenticate each other using one-hop communications. No central authentication server is required. Fast authentication for roaming from one MAP to another is supported by using tickets. Our performance and security analysis show that our proposed authentication protocols are efficient and resilient to various kinds of attacks.