A novel ID-based multi-domain handover protocol for mesh points in WMNs

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) provide an efficient and flexible method to the field of wireless networking, but also bring many security issues. A mesh point may lose all of its available links during its movement. Thus, the mesh point needs to handover to a new mesh point in order to obtain access to the network again. For multi-domain WMNs, we proposed a new ID-based signcryption scheme and accordingly present a novel ID-based handover protocol for mesh points. The mutual authentication and key establishment of two mesh points which belong to different trust domains can be achieved by using a single one-round message exchange during the authentication phase. The authentication server is not involved in our handover authentication protocol so that mutual authentication can be completed directly by the mesh points. Meanwhile, the data transmitted between the two mesh points can be carried by the authentication messages. Moreover, there are no restrictions on the PKG system parameters in our proposed multi-domain ID-based signcryption scheme so our handover scheme can be easily applied to real WMNs circumstances. Security of the signcryption scheme is proved in the random oracle model. It shows that our protocol satisfies the basic security requirements and is resistant to existing attacks based on the security of the signcryption. The analysis of the performance demonstrates that the protocol is efficient and suitable for the multi-domain WMNs environment. Keywords: wireless mesh networks, handover, ID-based, multi-domain, signcryption