Network performance evaluation of wireless IEEE802.11n encryption methods on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 operating systems

Wireless networks have increased in popularity in recent years, and is now seen as a critical technology in any network infrastructure. Wireless communication is convenient and plays a prominent role in networking, however security and performance is a major concern. In this research, performance of wireless IEEE802.11n is evaluated on two operating systems, namely Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. A network is created on a test-bed and performance related metrics is tested for both TCP and UDP protocols. Wireless security encryption methods (WEP-64, WEP-128, WPA and WPA2) are implemented on each operating system to evaluate their impact on network performance. This study shows that performance of wireless is operating system dependant, and various encryption methods impact performance significantly: throughput values can drop by up to 80% with some encryption methods. It is also seen that WPA2 behaves significantly different to the other encryption methods.