Minimizing re-authentication overheads in infrastructure IEEE 802.11 WLAN networks

Authentication delays of the order of Is are a severe bottleneck in maintaining QoS guarantees over WLANs. Pre-authentication schemes have been proposed to reduce these delays. However, most of these schemes suffer from an increased message overhead on the network The primary reason for this is that mobility modeling is not on a per-user basis. In this paper, we exploit the notion of predictability in user mobility patterns and propose a set of novel proactive key distribution algorithms to achieve low latencies while minimizing the message overhead in the network. We further provide a model to measure the responsiveness of our schemes to randomness in user motion. Simulation results indicate up to 60% message reduction in comparison to existing schemes, while maintaining similar latency values.