The Design And Implementation Of Authentication And Fast Handover In Wireless LAN

The scale and processing ability of Internet have been developed for more than twenty years. At the end of the twentieth century IEEE published the first 802.11 wireless network standard. From then on Internet came into a brand new era. Although wireless brings many new applications and businesses, it causes some other problems. How to design a kind of network structure, which keeps compatible with older networks and handles easily with distributed, bulk data transferred and low time delayed applications, become an urgent question for network engineers. Additional, network designers also keep concern on how to improve the quality of services in wireless LAN.This article is originally based on IETF split-MAC structure and 802.11i protocol. Based on the prototype a new kind of user authentication and key negotiation method was designed and realized. After this method was executed, the communication data between user and access point will be highly protected. More over for the mobility of the wireless system the layer 2 and layer 3 fast handover was also proposed and implemented, the user will completely unaware of the low level network switching and also the applications' data through upper protocol will not be interrupted.