Latency evaluation of authentication protocols in centralized 802.11 architecture

With the growing of telecommunication technology, people can connect to the Internet wirelessly anywhere and anytime. IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) became the preferred technology for providing Internet access in both indoors and outdoors environments for private and public usage. In order to establish the connection, users need to authenticate and associate with the Access Point (AP) to get access to the network. This was originally not a secured environment. For securing authentication process, many protocols had been introduced to protect the WLANs against unauthorized access from attackers. This paper aims to evaluate the performance of different authentication protocols in Centralized 802.11 Architecture by comparing the latency for Authentication and Association, 802.1x Authentication and Key Management phases. Experiments were performed on a centralized WLAN testbed consisting of Access Controller (AC), AP, RADIUS server and Client in neighbourhood AP environment. We analyse the authentication protocols in error free and error prone scenarios to study the effect of error during re-authentication process during handover. WPA2-Enterprise authentication methods cause the highest re-authentication latency compare with open-system authentication and WPA2-Personal authentication. In the re-authentication component for WPA2Enterprise, 802.1x authentication phase cause highest latency than authentication and association phase and key management phase.