Patent ID: 7340525

Claim:
A method to facilitate single sign-on services in a wireless environment, comprising: receiving a request at an application server from a wireless gateway on behalf of a user to access a partner application within a set of partner applications in the wireless environment on the application server; determining if the wireless gateway holds a token granting access to the partner application on behalf of the user; and if the wireless gateway does not hold the token, redirecting the request to a single sign-on server, requesting a user authentication credential from the user through the wireless gateway, receiving the user authentication credential, verifying if the user is authorized to access the partner application based on the user authentication credential, and if the user is authorized to access the partner application, issuing the token to the wireless gateway, wherein the token grants access to the partner application by the wireless gateway on behalf of the user; otherwise, if the current time is earlier than a time stamp within the token: granting access to the partner application, and updating the time stamp within the token by the partner application, wherein if a second partner application within the set of partner applications updates the time stamp within the token, the wireless gateway can continue to grant access on behalf of the user to the set of partner applications in the wireless environment, and wherein if the current time is earlier than the time stamp within the token, the token can be used to access the partner application prior to updating the time stamp within the token.