Enhancing the performance of secured handover protocols in UMTS-WiMAX interworking

Interworking UMTS and WiMAX networks offers global roaming and cost effective broadband wireless Internet access. Designing efficient Intra and Inter WiMAX handovers in the interworking architecture is a challenging problem. Handovers must be instantaneous and secure at the same time. We attempt to solve this problem by designing Intra and Inter WiMAX handover protocols which are capable of operating in the UMTS-WiMAX interworking architecture and perform mutual pre-authentication between the mobile station and the target network prior to handover. Due to the pre-authentication procedure, our proposed handover protocols outperform standard handover protocols by dispatching fewer handover signaling messages, experiencing less handover delay and preserving computation resources of critical nodes in the interworking architecture. Furthermore, our proposed handover protocols meet essential security requirements and defend against common attacks affecting handover protocols.