Abstract—This paper investigates the impact ofsecurity on the performance of WLAN. More specifically, itanalyzes the impact of different implementations ofencryption techniques used by two security protocols,namely Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-FiProtected Access (WPA) on the throughput over WLANIEEE 802.11g.This paper also addresses the different issues related to thesecurity protocols currently used in WLAN IEEE 802.11gand demonstrates how these issues affect the final results ofthe experiments conducted. The results show that within thesame access point range the security adds moderatedegradation on the throughput that may affect someapplications over both infrastructure and ad hoc WLANs.

Index Terms—WLAN, WEP, Infrastructure Networks,Ad hoc Networks, Wireless Security

Cite: Ezedin Barka and Mohammed Boulmalf, "On The Impact of Security on the Performance of WLANs," Journal of Communications, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 10-17, 2007.