Open Issues in Secure Vertical Handoff Techniques for Next Generation Wireless Networks

Abstract

The 4G Wireless Networks (WN) have not only provided seamless connection; they also strive to provide Quality of Service (QoS) to the users. However, providing efficient QoS to the users is quite often challenging due to large number of users and significant traffic load. One of the popular techniques to provide consistent QoS to the user is Vertical Handoff (VH). The main concept of VH is to migrate the user to another WN which can provide the requested QoS. Even though substantial contribution has been made in the literature for VH techniques, security oriented VH techniques are limited in number. Security aspect has become critical in Next Generation WN, due to new form of threats which are being introduced, and VH techniques also need to focus on security issues to provide safe and robust communication. In the literature, survey on different security threats, secure VH techniques and future issues has not been effectively presented; in this work, comprehensive survey on all these aspects is presented to aid future research in secure VH