MSc Thesis, University of Helsinki, 2009


Securing Handover in Wireless IP Networks

Abstract:

In wireless and mobile networks, handover is a complex 
process that involves multiple layers of protocol and 
security executions. With the growing popularity of 
real time communication services such as Voice of IP, 
a great challenge faced by handover nowadays comes 
from the impact of security implementations that can 
cause performance degradation especially for mobile 
devices with limited resources. 

Given the existing networks with heterogeneous wireless 
access technologies, one essential research question 
that needs be addressed is how to achieve a balance 
between security and performance during the handover. 
The variations of security policy and agreement among 
different services and network vendors make the topic 
challenging even more, due to the involvement of 
commercial and social factors. 

In order to understand the problems and challenges in 
this field, we study the properties of handover as 
well as state of the art security schemes to assist 
handover in wireless IP networks. Based on our 
analysis, we define a two-phase model to identify the 
key procedures of handover security in wireless and 
mobile networks. Through the model we analyze the 
performance impact from existing security schemes in 
terms of handover completion time, throughput, and 
Quality of Services (QoS). As our endeavor of seeking
a balance between handover security and performance, 
we propose the local administrative domain as a 
security enhanced localized domain to promote the 
handover performance. To evaluate the performance 
improvement in local administrative domain, we 
implement the security protocols adopted by our 
proposal in the ns-2 simulation environment and 
analyze the measurement results based on our 
simulation test.


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@mastersthesi{Ding:Thesis:MSc:2009,
author       = {Yi Ding}, 
title        = {Securing Handover in Wireless IP Networks},
school       = {University of Helsinki},
year         = 2009,
month        = 12,
}

Yi Ding. Securing Handover in Wireless IP Networks. Master's Thesis, University of Helsinki, 2009.