General strategies for context re-establishment in IEEE 802.11 networks

Despite of the evident success of the IEEE 802.11 standard, mobility support remains an open issue in networks based on this technology. Particularly, the management exchanges performed by the station during the handover (handover execution) affects the communication performance. Several work have been proposed to enhance the handover execution in IEEE 802.11 network. However, the proposed solutions have limited applications and are not able to support all services and functionalities brought by the different evolutions of the IEEE 802.11. In this paper, we present a set of general strategies for layer-2 handover execution optimization based on context re-establishment. Additionally, we detail the application of these general strategies to propose fast re-authentication mechanisms under the IEEE 802.11i. The diversity of authentication information characteristics that have to be established allows demonstrating the generality of the proposed strategies.