Performance analysis of evolving wireless IEEE 802.11 security architectures

Degradation in performance has been a common reason for the limited use of security in Wireless LAN equipment such as wireless PCs and embedded devices such as PDAs. However, such performance has depended in part upon the technical options chosen for encryption, authentication and re-keying. Thus this paper describes the performance analysis and empirical measurement of a range of security levels based upon variations of WEP, WPA and WPA2 in a variety of Wireless LAN architectures. The paper provides an analysis of performance measured over a range of experiments run on a testbed and builds upon previous work on performance analysis of earlier wireless network security protocols.