A New Standard for Securing Media-Independent Handover: IEEE 802.21a

Published

December 31, 2013

Author(s)

Rafa Marin-Lopez, Fernando Bernal-Hidalgo, Subir Das, Lidong Chen, Yoshihiro Ohba

Abstract

When enabling handover between different radio interfaces (e.g., handover from 3G to Wi-Fi), reducing network access authentication latency and securing handover related signaling messages are major challenging problems, amongst many others. The IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards committee has recently finished its standardization work in this area by defining the IEEE std 802.21a-2012. The mechanisms introduced in this standard are aimed to protect the IEEE std 802.21-2008 messages and services and to reduce handover latency by introducing the concept of proactive authentication. We provide a comprehensive survey of this standard and describe how the defined mechanisms can be used to reduce the overall latency during handover between access networks using heterogeneous radio interfaces.

Citation

IEEE Wireless Communications

Volume

20

Issue

6

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/MWC.2013.6704478

Local Download

Keywords

fast handover, IEEE 802.21, media independent handover, security

Citation

Marin-Lopez, R. , Bernal-Hidalgo, F. , Das, S. , Chen, L. and Ohba, Y. (2013), A New Standard for Securing Media-Independent Handover: IEEE 802.21a, IEEE Wireless Communications, [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/MWC.2013.6704478, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=914725 (Accessed October 14, 2025)