An access authentication protocol for trusted handoff in wireless mesh networks

• A trust-based protocol is proposed for secure handoff in wireless mesh networks.
• Security properties are formally verified based on an enhanced Strand model.
• Performance is evaluated and shown to be more advantageous than the EMSA scheme.

WMNs (Wireless Mesh Networks) are a new wireless broadband network structure based completely on IP technologies and have rapidly become a broadband access measure to offer high capacity, high speed and wide coverage. Trusted handoff in WMNs requires that mobile nodes complete access authentication not only with a short delay, but also with the security protection for the mobile nodes as well as the handoff network. In this paper, we propose a trusted handoff protocol based on several technologies, such as hierarchical network model, ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography), trust evaluation and gray relevance analysis. In the protocol, the mobile platform's configuration must be measured before access to the handoff network can proceed and only those platforms whose configuration meets the security requirements can be allowed to access the network. We also verify the security properties through formal analysis based on an enhanced Strand model and evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol through simulation to show that our protocol is more advantageous than the EMSA (Efficient Mesh Security Association) authentication scheme in terms of success rate and average delay.