Measuring of the time consumption of the WLAN's security functions

Securing of the communication is the key parameter for all wireless networks. WLAN's vulnerability to security threads is solved by several security mechanisms but all of these mechanisms have negative impact to the communication speed and final network performance. Time consumption of different security mechanisms used in wireless networks limits availability for several time-sensitive applications. This paper is focused on the performance tests of the WLAN IEEE 802.11g. New testbed for measuring of the basic network parameters with 10 ns resolution was developed and used for measuring influence of different security level which can be applied in IEEE 802.11g. Three main parameters of network communication in the wireless networks are bandwidth, delay and jitter. Knowing values of those three parameters allows us to decide if the WLAN's parameters are acceptable for using in real-time applications or not. Based on the measured network dynamics we can select which real-time application is suitable for this wireless network. In our measuring we focused on the basic security mechanisms like WEP, WPA and WPA2. We also measured impact of the additional encrypted communication tunnel on the WLAN performance because VPN tunnel with encryption functions is one of the widely used security solutions.