Mobile PKI: A PKI-Based Authentication Framework for the Next Generation Mobile Communications

The next generation mobile Internet is expected to develop towards “Always Best Connected (ABC)”, or “Any Time, Any Where, Any Service”, and provide completely open environments for interconnection with the external world through the IP-enabled structure. In addition to this, the support for new kinds of management such as service provisioning, customization, and personalization will lead to a more complicated network revolution. In the paper, we propose an authentication framework, which use PKI-based mutual authentication to establish trust relations between the communication entities and to guarantee minimized handover delay by extending the trust relations. The simulation results, in conjunction with the experiment conducted on a WLAN testbed, are presented that illustrate how the framework can best be applied to the next generation mobile environments.