8

Security

The IEEE 802.16-2009 standard describes a security sublayer that oversees entity authentication and message privacy, and defines the primitives required for these operations. The IEEE 802.16m amendment refines the IEEE 802.16 in security with additional security primitives and operations.

This chapter is organized as follows. Section 8.1 describes the Security Sublayer in IEEE 802.16-2009, including security associations, authentication mechanisms and encryption. In defining the IEEE 802.16j for multihop relay in WiMAX networks, the standard introduced the notion of Security Zones in order facilitate security management. This notion is described in Section 8.2. Finally, an overview of security in for the IEEE 802.16m is provided in Section 8.3.