Selecting transition process for WLAN security

In wireless local area network (WLAN), a station (STA) accesses the Internet through an access point (AP). When switching from one AP to another, the STA executes the transition process, which may incur long delay and result in force‐termination for real‐time applications. The IEEE 802.11r proposes the fast basic service set (BSS) transition to speed up the transiti on process for a STA moving within the same mobility domain (MD). This scheme requires unique MD assignment so that the STA knows whether it should conduct fast BSS transition process (for intra‐MD scenario) or the expensive initial MD association process (for inter‐MD scenario). However, how to guarantee unique MD identifier (MDID) assignment is not mentioned in the specification. This paper proposes a mechanism for IEEE 802.11r fast transition without using MDID, and therefore eliminates the cost for MDID management. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.