Roaming across wireless local area networks using SIM-based authentication protocol

Wireless local area networks provide high speed data transferring rate to a mobile device. And it is crucial to integrate together two critical issues, the authentication and roaming in heterogeneous networks. For this, Tsai and Chang proposed a SIM-based authentication mechanism for wireless local area networks in 2006. Tsai and Chang's scheme provides an integration method of mobile cellular networks and wireless local area networks. Unfortunately, we found that there are some weaknesses existing in their scheme. In this paper, we propose an improved version for a user roaming in heterogeneous networks. Besides, we also proposed a mobile IP model to provide a better efficiency for a mobile user in WLAN environment.