Laboratory Performance of Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 B,G WPA2 Point-to-Point Links: a Case Study

Wireless communications using microwaves are increasingly important, e.g. Wi-Fi. Performance is a crucial issue, leading to more reliable and efficient communications. Security is equally very important. Laboratory measurements are made about several performance aspects of Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11b, g) WPA2 point-to-point links. A contribution is given to performance evaluation of this technology under WPA2 encryption, using available equipments (WRT54GL wireless routers from Linksys). Detailed results are presented and discussed, namely at OSI levels 4 and 7, from TCP, UDP and FTP experiments: TCP throughput, jitter, percentage datagram loss and FTP transfer rate. Comparisons are made to corresponding results obtained for open links. Conclusions are drawn about the comparative performance of the links.