3. Performance Study of the Impact of Security on 802.11ac Networks

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) are gaining popularity due to the ease of use and ubiquity. Notwithstanding, their inherent characteristics make them more vulnerable to security breaches compared to wired networks. IEEE 802.11ac specification is currently the widely used WLAN standard deployed by most organizations.

We study the impact of security on 802.11AC WLANs using different security modes (No Security, Personal and Enterprise Security) using a test WLAN. The performance analysis is based on throughput, delay, jitter, loss ratio and connection time. Our experiments indicate a performance improvement when no security is implemented relative to other security modes. For throughput performance, improvements ranged between 1.6 and 8.2% depending on the transport (TCP/UDP) and network (IPv4/IPv6) layer protocol. Improvements between 2.8 and 7.9% was observed when no security is implemented for delay. Jitter, Loss Ratio and connection time experienced between 1.3 and 18.6% improvement in performance. Though the performance degradation because of implementing security measures on 802.11ac WLANs appear relatively insignificant per the study, we believe the situation could be different when a heterogeneously complex setup is used. However, other factors (e.g. channel congestion, interference etc.) may equally be responsible for the performance degradation in WLANs that may not be necessarily security related.