Comparative performance studies of laboratory WPA IEEE 802.11g point-to-point links

Wireless communications using microwaves are increasingly important, e.g. Wi-Fi. Performance is a very important issue, resulting in more reliable and efficient communications. Security is equally very important. Laboratory measurements are made about several performance aspects of Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11g WPA point-to-point links. A contribution is given to performance evaluation of this technology under WPA encryption, using available wireless routers from Linksys (WRT54GL). Detailed results are presented and discussed, namely at OSI levels 4 and 7, from TCP, UDP and FTP experiments, permitting measurements of TCP throughput, jitter, percentage datagram loss and FTP transfer rate. Comparisons are made to corresponding results obtained for, mainly, open links. Conclusions are drawn about the comparative performance of the links.