Testing the Performance of Wireless LAN

WLANs based on 802.11 standards are rapidly becoming popular in computer networks. Despite the advantages that have been obtained from this technology, its performance in terms of throughput, response time and security affected by many environmental factors such as distance, blockage, authentication mechanism and type of encryption used during the authentication and the data transmission. There are other security issues such as vulnerability to attack by the man-in-the-middle (MiM) attack which becomes a great concern for users and owners. However, the focus of this paper is for testing the WLAN performance under different conditions. The test results and recommendation can be used by designer and networks users to understand the limitation and how to improve the use of WLAN to optimize its capability. It is clear from the results obtained during the test, that WLAN response time is more affected by network load and very little effect by the size of encryption of WEP used in WLAN. The signal strength is very well affected by distance and blockage, which also affects the throughput. However, the throughput would be affected more with network load.