stations in standby mode in a wireless local area network become disassociated with their access point . in the event traffic is intended for the station in standby mode , a wakeup message needs to be communicated to the station . typically , a wakeup message could be broadcast on a broadcast or multicast address , and when the station checks for broadcasts , the station can determine whether it needs to wake up . however , in a protected network , a disassociated station cannot decrypt messages from the access point without reassociating . however , the cost of reassociating in time and power can be significant , so reassociating should not be performed unless the station needs to wake up , leading to a vicious cycle as the station does not know it must wake up unless it can decrypt the message . to address this issue , in one embodiment the access points do not encrypt messages on a select multicast address , whereby messages such as wakeup message can be transmitted . in another embodiment , the messages are still encrypted . however , the identification of which station must wake up is encoded as the length of the encrypted payload . these methods allow a general message of communicating to disassociated stations in a protected wlan environment .