An Energy Efficient Authentication and Key Management Protocol for 802.11 WLANs

Due to the scarce resources of small devices in wireless networks, it is preferable that security protocols be lightweight and energy efficient while being secure. In this paper, we describe the existing WLAN standard for authentication and key management (AKM), namely, IEEE 802.11i. The AKM protocol in 802.11i can be fairly energy hungry especially when mobile stations roam or temporarily disconnect from the infrastructure. We demonstrate the possibility of maintaining and allowing secure roaming and reconnections in WLANs while reducing the energy consumption of devices by proposing two modifications to the 802.11i protocol that are lightweight and energy-efficient. We provide performance comparison between our proposed schemes and the standard schemes.