Journal Homepage: www.ijcst.org

Abstract — Authentication forms an important part of security mechanism by securing the networks from unauthorized access. The time taken by the client to authenticate to the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP)-enabled Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) will have a significant impact on the real time applications particularly under mobile conditions. Also, the number of messages involved in the authentication will have a significant impact on the energy consumption as the mobile terminal is having limited energy source (battery). In this paper the quantitative analysis of Extensible Authentication Protocols is provided and the security features of these protocols are compared. The protocols compared are EAP-MD5, EAP-TLS, and PEAP. A simple authentication protocol, EAP-Simple Authentication Mechanism (SAM) is proposed in this paper, consisting of reduced number of authentication messages. The reduced number of authentication messages yields the least authentication delay as well as the reduced energy consumption resulting in uninterrupted services for the real time applications