| Abstract |
Delivering ubiquitous services to various mobile users through heterogeneous networks is a major objective in the next generation mobile networks. The delivery should be efficient and secure. Therefore, the need for secured seamless fast handovers and the support for the integration of security, Quality-of-Service (QoS) and mobility management (MM) become parts of the essential issues. An Enhanced Node (EN) with a network sub-layer is proposed here to achieve the integration. The baseline architectural framework with the intelligent ENs located in the IP-based access networks is presented. Based on the framework, we propose here an enhanced key management scheme to secure the handover procedures within one access network. In the enhanced scheme, a bunch of handover keys are generated at one time when the mobile user enters a new subnet domain, rather than every single time the mobile user changes the access point. Consequently, making use of the intelligence of the ENs, security can be coupled with the mobility protocol to secure the handover procedures without introducing too much signalling overhead and handover latency. In addition, the handover keys can not only secure the registration messages, such as Binding Update (BU), but also protect the essential QoS messages, such as QoS context transfer message. The numerical results and analysis are also presented in this paper to evaluate the performance. |