A study of performance improvement in EAP

Abstract

Followed by the popularity of the Internet, a number of access technologies to the Internet have been developed. EAP is an authentication framework. It is designed to provide the authentication functionality in the access network. Because of its flexibility and extensibility EAP poses a global solution for the authentication supported by many access networks. However, EAP has critical weaknesses in the protocol which may, in turn, decrease the EAP performance. Some of the weaknesses are caused by the "lock-step" flow control which only supports a single packet in flight. Considering the weaknesses, we propose the solution for the flow control. Using simulation we prove that our solutions improve the EAP performance. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.