A Flow-Based Authentication Handover Mechanism for Multi-Domain SDN Mobility Environment

The long authentication handoverdelay is the greatest challenge in multi-domainSDN environment. In order to solve this prob-lem, an authentication handover mechanismunder multi-SDN domain （AHMMD） is pro-posed in this paper. In AHMMD, firstly, whenthe mobility entity accesses the network forthe first time, its identity and service attributesare authenticated by the flow authenticationprotocol, which is designed based on theasymmetric encryption key; secondly, whenthe mobility entity moves to the neighbor do-main, the authentication information will bedelivered from the current controller to theneighborhood controller through a securitycommunication channel. In order to promotethe efficiency, a handover time prediction al-gorithm is adopted in AHMMD. Experimentalresults based on our AHMMD prototype haveshown that the handover delay decreases by50% while the handover cost decreases by60%.