The performance of different IEEE802.11 security protocol standard on 2.4ghz and 5GHz WLAN networks

Abstract

The availability and reasonable cost of broadband Internet made it an attractive and favourable option to billions of users worldwide. Being a fast service also encourages its users to use real-time applications which is streaming and live data transfer includes VoIP and video streaming. The performance of such applications in Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) may be highly affected by security protocols. This paper examines the effect of different security protocols on the performance of WLAN with real-time application and live data transfer applications. Experiments has been done on a wireless test-bed and the results were analyzed for signal strength, throughput, delay, packet loss, jitter and mean opinion score (MOS) for four security settings which are without security, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), and Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2). This paper investigates the impact of security on the performance of WLAN. It analyzes the impact of different implementations of encryption techniques used on the throughput over WLAN. The results showed a significant degradation in performance when security protocols were enabled in WLAN. This paper also addresses the different issues related to the security protocols used in WLAN and demonstrates how these issues affect the final results of the experiments.