Fast and secure universal roaming service for mobile Internet

Rapid deployment of IEEE 802.11 based wireless access networks in hot spots and the integration of the networks to the existing wide-area communication infrastructure have become a major driving force to speed up the design and development of necessary security and quality of service (QoS)-guaranteed mechanisms with roaming capacity to mobile users. Three issues are raised in such a communication environment: a) service users would like to have IP-based roaming capability as they move rather than being constrained to a single spot or being forced to disconnect because his/her service provider does not have entire coverage of the city/region; b) the need on security and accounting management for mobile Internet; and c) the execution of AAA however would incur extra delay to handoff latency. For applications like VoIP, video streaming and TCP connections, it may disrupt the on-going communications if such latency becomes too large. In this paper, we propose an AAA-enabled roaming alliance architecture that provides fast and secure universal roaming service across multiple service domains. The associated protocols and the supporting security mechanisms are also proposed. Our design provides continuing communications service to mobile user belonging to different service operators to quickly and securely access service when roaming across multiple service domains. Mobile users only need to carry a U-mobile token to receive the service. The schemes proposed only incur minimal latency in security check. This is particularly important to the support of real-time mobile applications.