The wireless medium is a key technology for enabling ubiquitous and continuous network connectivity. It is becoming more and more important in our daily life especially with the increasing adoption of networking technologies in many fields such as medical care and transportation systems. Although most wireless technologies nowadays provide satisfying bandwidth and higher speeds, several of these technologies still lack improvements with regard to handoff performance. In this paper, we focus on wireless network technologies that rely on the Extensible Authentication Protocol for mutual authentication between the station and the access network. Such technologies include local area wireless networks (IEEE 802.11) as well as broadband wireless networks (IEEE 802.16). We present a new EAP authentication method based on a three party authentication scheme, namely Kerberos, that considerably shortens handoff delays. Compared to other methods, the proposed method has the advantage of not requiring any changes on the access points, making it readily deployable at reasonable costs.

There are many kinds of control networks, which have been used in various non-IP network areas, such as BA (Building Automation), FA (Factory Automation) and PA (Process Automation). They are now introducing IP and face the issues of security and configuration complexity. The authors have proposed a model which intends to solve these issues while satisfying restrictions, i.e. small embedded devices, isolated networks and private naming system/name space, which are required when introducing new functionality into existing control networks. Secure bootstrap sequence and device-to-device communication using the chain of trust are the points of the model. This paper shows the practicability of the model through implementing the model experimentally.