Secure Handover in Enterprise WLANs: CAPWAP, HOKEY, and IEEE 802.11r

As Wireless LANs become more and more ubiquitous, the number and types of applications they are supporting is ever-increasing. As real-time performance requirements begin to emerge, the latency involved in a handover from one access point to another becomes crucial. CAPWAP and HOKEY are two suites of protocols being defined and standardized within the IETF that include support for fast handover. IEEE 802.11r is implementing extensions to the IEEE 802.11 base specification to directly support fast handover in the MAC protocol. This paper details all three protocols, and compares their relative security properties, performance, and use cases.