Performance Evaluation of Laboratory Wi-fi Ieee 802.11a Wpa Point-to-multipoint Links

Wireless communications, e.g. Wi-Fi, have been increasingly important in the context of networked and virtual organizations and enterprise information systems. Performance is an issue of crucial importance, resulting in more reliable and efficient communications, therefore improving enterprise information system yield. Security is equally important. Laboratory measurements were made about several performance aspects of Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11a WPA point-to-multipoint links. Our study contributes to performance evaluation of this technology under WPA encryption, using available equipments (DAP-1522 access points from D-Link and WPC600N adapters from Linksys). New 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 WPA point-to-point and Open point-to-multipoint links. Conclusions are drawn about the comparative performance of the links.