Patent ID: 8270947

Claim:
A method of providing a supplicant access to at least one service offered by an authenticator in a wireless communications network, the method comprising at the authenticator: establishing one or more security associations with one or more neighbor nodes upon authenticating the one or more neighbor nodes, wherein each security association corresponds to at least one service set comprising a plurality of services; receiving an authentication request from a supplicant corresponding to a service set; forwarding the authentication request to an authentication server designated for use when authenticating supplicants for the requested service set via a neighbor node with which the authenticator has a security association corresponding to the requested service set, wherein the authentication server authenticates the supplicant for the requested service set; receiving, in response to the forwarded authentication request, an indication corresponding to whether the supplicant has successfully authenticated for the requested service set; and creating a security association with the supplicant when the indication corresponds to a successful authentication, for use by the supplicant to communicate with one or more other nodes authenticated for the same service set, wherein the creating step further comprises: creating a map between the security association corresponding to the requested service set with the supplicant and the respective security association corresponding to the same service set with one or more other neighbor nodes.