Fast re-authentication for inter-domain handover using context transfer

The exponential growth of wireless mobile systems in recent years has created strong demand to handover between different administration domains. Such movement suffers from limited resources such as limited bandwidth and high latency. Furthermore, authentication is the key factor when providing mobile roaming services, so fast re-authentication is one of the important issues to achieve a short overall handover delay. Therefore, it is important to develop techniques that utilize the available bandwidth efficiently. One way of utilizing the wireless resources efficiently is by transferring the required context that authenticates the user in new visited domain of the running session rather than establishing the connection from scratch. Current approaches only consider a repeated authentication process run for a new visited domain and therefore, can potentially introduce high latency by communicating with authorization services of a home domain. In this paper, we propose a novel way to authenticate a mobile node without the necessity to communicate with the home domain while maintaining a high level of security. We provide an overview of the method, show the improvement to related approaches in terms of message flows and discuss security aspects.