A Secure and Efficient Handover Procedure Between WiFi and WiMAX Network

The IEEE 802.21 Standard was proposed to integrate the Media Independent Handover (MIHs) among wireless network interfaces, such as WiFi, WiMAX and 3GPP. However, the IEEE 802.21 Standard neither provides security mechanisms nor provides seamless roaming. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient handover procedure between WiFi and WiMAX networks in which the proposed scheme involves security functionalities that guarantees the handover messages will be transmitted securely; in addition, by reducing the authentication processes, the proposed scheme greatly reduces authentication time to 62.5% in compared with the IEEE 802.21 Standard.