Effects of the EAPOL Timers in IEEE 802.1X Authentication

This paper studies IEEE 802.1X authentication for WLAN and cellular integration. In the IEEE 802.1X standard, several timeout timers are defined for message exchanges in the EAPOL protocol, where the same fixed value is suggested for these timeout timers. We observe that the delays for the EAPOL message exchanges may significantly vary. A modeling study is performed to tune the values of individual timers to yield better performance than that for the identical timeout period setting. Our study provides guidelines to select appropriate timeout values for IEEE 802.1X operation.