Comparative performance studies of laboratory Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 b,g WEP point-to-point links

Wireless communications using microwaves are increasingly important, e.g. Wi-Fi. Performance is a crucial issue, leading to more reliable and efficient communications. Security is equally important. Laboratory measurements are made about several performance aspects of Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11b, g) WEP point-to-point links. A contribution is given to performance evaluation of this technology under WEP encryption, using two types of equipments (RBTR2 access points from Enterasys Networks and WRT54GL wireless routers from Linksys). Detailed results are presented and discussed, namely at OSI levels 4 and 7, from TCP, UDP and FTP experiments: TCP throughput, jitter, percentage datagram loss and FTP transfer rate. Comparisons are made and conclusions are drawn about the comparative performance of the links.