Laboratory performance measurements of IEEE 802.11 a WEP PTMP links

Abstract

Wireless communications using microwaves are increasingly important, e.g. Wi-Fi. Performance is a very crucial issue, improving reliability and efficiency in communications. Security is also critically important. Laboratory performance measurements are presented for Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 a WEP point-to-multipoint links. Our study contributes to performance evaluation of this technology under WEP encryption, using available equipments (HP V-M200 access points and Linksys WPC600N adapters). The paper gives new results from TCP, UDP and FTP experiments in terms of TCP throughput, jitter, percentage of datagram loss and the FTP transfer rate for OSI layers 4 and 7, which are compared with the data from WEP point-to-point, Open point-to-multipoint links and WPA. Conclusions are drawn about the comparative performance of the links.