Efficient handover authentication protocol with message integrity for mobile clients in wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) has become the most favorable choice among various networking options due to its distributed nature. It offers continuous Internet services, in comparison with other conventional networks, through a self-healing and self-configuration approach. Due to the high mobility of mesh clients, handover authentication is an operation that demands significant attention in WMNs. Through the exchange of messages, mesh clients (MCs) and mesh routers (MRs) initiate the operation, allowing the client to authenticate itself with the foreign mesh router (FMR). In existing protocols, these messages were shared in plaintext format, making it easy for an attacker to breach their integrity. Therefore, a secure communication method should be established between MCs and MRs for message exchange. In this paper, we propose a protocol that offers efficient authentication while preserving message integrity during the handover operation. The experimental results show that our proposed protocol performs better and overcomes the limitations present in the existing protocols.