An experimental study on wireless security protocols over mobile IP networks

Security protocols have emerged as a vital issue to support secure and reliable communications over wireless networks. Many works have discussed security services from a functional perspective; however, there is a lack of quantitative results demonstrating the impact of security protocols on system performance that can be affected dramatically by applying security policies in combination with mobility. Therefore, we conduct an experimental study on a wireless IP testbed, and analyze the interaction of security protocols at different layers with respect to data streams, delay and throughput. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of performance measurements and the overhead associated with several most widely used protocols such as WEP, IPSEC, 802.1x and SSL.