There have been remarkable growths in wireless communication networks in

recent years; this is because of its merits over the wired networks such as

Mobility and convenience. Wireless networks transmit the signal over the

open air via radio waves of different frequencies, this makes it to be

vulnerable to several attacks and anybody on the street can easily intercept the

wireless data or inject new data into the entire network. There has been

existence of wired equivalent privacy (WEP) protocol (IEEE 802.11i), which

was designed for wireless network security. There were concerns of security

vulnerabilities in WEP; this made it necessary for the implementation of

another solution to overcome the weaknesses of the previous wireless

network security. The IEEE 802.1X (port-based network admission control)

which is defined on Extensible Authentication protocol (EAP) provides

effective and efficient admission control to wireless and other networks

devices [8].

Our thesis investigates the efficiency of NAC (IEEE 802.1X) as a security

solution, access different vendor solutions, protocols supported and look into

the inter-operability of these various vendors. In as much as we support the

premise of NAC being an excellent solution, we will also make brilliant

recommendations in this thesis to be considered for future refinements of this

security solution as well as deployment scenarios for the university network.