A comparison study between wireless bridging and routing

Routers and bridges are the basic devices used for building data networks. In particular, wireless bridges provide a means to extend network coverage range by wirelessly linking access points. In this paper, we investigate the performance of TCP and UDP protocols using routing and two different bridging configurations. We report measurements made over a heterogenous multihop wireless network. The results show that TCP and UDP protocols perform better with bridging (using two WLAN cards) than with routing. However, when bridging is configured with only one WLAN card, the throughput decreased significantly. Our tests indicate that routing and bridging with two cards are more affected by variation in TCP and UDP packet sizes than bridging with one card. Both TCP and UDP throughput increase with packet size. The best result is achieved when the packet size is 1500.