Key caching mechanism for AAA over mobile IP

RFC 2977 proposes the Authentication, Authorization, Accounting (AAA) framework architecture for mobile IP to protect signaling messages from eavesdropping by malicious attackers. The AAA server in the home network (i.e., AAAH) generates and distributes session keys to Mobile Node (MN), Foreign Agent (FA), and Home Agent (HA), which is known as the authentication procedure. The procedure for session key distribution introduces extra signaling overhead in the mobile IP network, which is not considered in RFC 2977. To resolve this issue, this paper proposes a key caching algorithm named AKC. With AKC, the MN can be authenticated locally without involving the AAAH. The simulation experiments are conducted to investigate the performance of the AKC algorithm.