Growing number of Wi-Fi Hotspot deployment in public areas such as coffee shops, campuses and enterprises are making use of centralized Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) deployment architecture. Centralized architecture facilitates the use of a single core network to support several Wi-Fi access networks with mandatory services like access control, authentication, authorization, accounting and network management. Centralized networks consist of an initial setup phase where Access Points (APs) associate with Access Controllers (AC) and authentication phase where the clients connect to AP and perform their network tasks such as data transfer and roaming. Both these phases introduce latency into the centralized WLAN network. Therefore, deployment of a centralized WLAN network poses a challenge for real-time applications that are sensitive to network latencies. This paper aims to simulate the setup phase and propose the ideal deployment scenario to achieve the least latency. With the help of a centralized WLAN testbed, the paper also experimentally evaluates the latencies involved in different types of authentication and association mechanisms, under erroneous and non-erroneous conditions, during roaming process of the authentication phase. The paper further proposes a holistic mechanism to reduce the overall latency for real-time applications. Keywords: Real-time applications, roaming, authentication, association, 802.1x;