Secure Fast Mobility Manager for Ubiquitous Wireless Home Networks

Abstract

We would like to propose a demonstration presentation about the technology of “Secure Fast Mobility Manager for Ubiquitous Wireless Home Networks”. Recently, the IEEE 802.11-based Wi-Fi networks have increasingly been being deployed throughout the world for the construction of wireless home networks. However, most Wi-Fi-based home networks do not allow home residents to freely roam around the town houses or apartments while talking with their friends with mobile devices such as PDA or Wi-Fi phones. This is because the existing Wi-Fi mobility management technology does not provide a fast handover function for real-time multimedia service such as VoIP and interactive IPTV. For home network environment, the building and room structures of the house often block the penetration of electronic waves so that a user may experience significant handover delay while roaming around the house, either inside or outside. In the demo, we will show a new technology of providing fast secure mobility management for indoor and/or outdoor Wi-Fi based home networks. The basic idea is to make use of the ubiquitous contextual information such as building structure, AP (Access Point) locations, user locations, access time, etc, in addition to the RSSI values, for the efficient secure fast mobility management. Figure 1 shows the logical configuration and procedures for providing seamless fast handover within a Wi-Fi hot zone. In Figure 1, a user can move around within a zone with both guaranteed handover delay and security. Here, the zone is defined as a collection of access points in which a user is guaranteed to receive a certain QoS and security service level. The zone is an expanded concept of ESS where QoS and security requirements are appended. When a mobile station enters into a new zone, it first accesses the mobility manager, called OMS (Open Mobility Server), through the access point to get its mobility and security information. The mobility and security information for a specific user is dynamically maintained by OMS using the surrounding contextual information as mentioned above, when he/she enters into or leaves the zone.