Implementation of IEEE802.1x in OPNET

IEEE802.11 suffered from limited data confidentiality and cumbersome procedure for exchange of security parameters. In response to the security limitations in IEEE802.11, IEEE introduced 802.1x for authentication and key management. IEEE802.1x is a port based network access control protocol that uses extensible authentication protocol (EAP) at the transport layer.IEEE802.1x defines authentication mechanism. However, OPNET does not have a special module to implement IEEE802.1x. This paper constructes a node model implementing IEEE802.1xpsilas authentication function in OPNET. According to the simulation, it can test the influence of authentication on network performance in wireless network. The simulation results show that the influence of authentication on network performance is mainly in initial stage, after the network reaches stable, the authentication function hardly has the extra influence on the network performance. Also OPNET is renewed.