Jui-Tang Wang

Group-Based Authentication and Key Agreement

This paper presents an authentication and key agreement protocol to streamline communication activities for a group of mobile stations (MSs) roaming from the same home network (HN) to a serving network (SN). In such a roaming scenario, conventional schemes require the SN to interact with the HN for authenticating respective MSs, at the cost of repeated message exchanges and communication delay. Instead, in our design, when the first MS of a group visits, the SN performs full authentication with the concerned HN and thereby obtains authentication information for the MS and other members. Thus when any other MS of the same group visits, the SN can authenticate locally without subsequent involvement of the HN, so as to simplify protocol operations. We will show that our scheme does not trade performance for security and robustness to the extent that security requirements are unduly weakened. Both qualitative and quantitative discussions indicate that our proposed scheme lends itself to pragmatic settings.

To Call or To Be Called Behind NATs is Sensitive in Solving the Direct Connection Problem

In this article, we first depict the call-role sensitivity problem in Network Address Translation (NAT) traversal, and then propose an approach to resolving the problem. The problem is whether a direct connection can be found between two peers across NATs mainly depends on the NAT type at the callers side. We propose the extra-candidate connectivity check where both peers initiate a direct connectivity check to eliminate the effect of the call role. We have implemented the extra-candidate connectivity check and conducted experiments with 18 different NATs. Experimental results show that our approach can indeed resolve the call-role sensitivity problem, and maximize the direct connectivity rate (DCR) which is improved by 18.71% from the original scheme.

A Fast Authentication Scheme for WiMAX---WLAN Vertical Handover

In view that authentication has made a significant determinant in handover delay, this paper presents a fast authentication mechanism for mobile stations roaming within a WiMAX–WLAN interconnected environment. Incorporating a key reuse design that prevents repeated transactions at a remote server, our mechanism distributes security contexts ahead of handover to a local trusted key holder which manages several sites. A target site, upon receiving a mobile station, retrieves the contexts locally for authentication purpose and thus completes handover efficiently. While employing a target prediction algorithm as an option, our mechanism distributes the contexts to target candidates as dictated, which further improves handover performance if target prediction hits and maintains its advantage even in a miss. In addition, the handover optimization design specified in WiMAX is extended to support WiFi-to-WiMAX handovers. We reason that the proposed mechanism does not compromise the system in any sense as well. Analytical and simulation results show that, despite key pre-distribution misses, our mechanism leads to marked improvement over counterpart schemes in terms of handover delay and packet loss, meeting delay-sensitive application requirements.

A Backbone-Aware Topology Formation (BATF) Scheme for ZigBee Wireless Sensor Networks

In a tree-structured ZigBee wireless sensor network, nodes close to the root of the tree (i.e., hot-spot nodes) may exhaust their power earlier than those distant from the root due to heavy loads on packet forwarding. This hot-spot problem is inherent in tree-structured networks and may demand extra energy to recover from failures of hot-spot nodes. In this paper, the backbone-aware topology formation (BATF) scheme is proposed to alleviate the hot-spot problem. BATF utilizes power-rich nodes to form a backbone tree that does not suffer from the hot-spot problem. Each power-rich node independently initiates a ZigBee tree network that attracts associations from ZigBee-compliant devices in order to distribute packet-forwarding loads over a larger set of nodes. Issues of BATF such as the partition of address space and ZigBee-compliant routing are discussed in detail. Simulation results confirm that BATF does alleviate the hot-spot problem as it improves network lifetime as well as data collection capability. Comparisons with native ZigBee protocols show that the improvement comes from our protocol design rather than simply introducing power-rich nodes.

Performance Improvement of Delay-Based TCPs in Asymmetric Networks

Delay-based TCPs detect network congestion in the early stage and successfully prevent periodic packet loss that usually occurs in loss-based TCPs. It has been demonstrated that delay-based algorithms outperform loss-based schemes in many aspects. However, a delay-based TCP may not prevent unnecessary throughput degradation in asymmetric networks and when the congestion occurs in the backward path over symmetric links. In this letter, we modify the mechanism of measuring RTT value for delay-based TCPs without clock synchronization. Based on the simulation results, we show the effectiveness and utilities.