Encryption affecting performance?

Hi, I'm working on a project on large wireless network and I have one question. What are transfer rates when using 802.11g with WPA or WPA2 encryption and EAP-TLS authentification? Is there any affect of using encryption on wireless network's performance?

Reply to
Alex81
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That was two questions.

This is stolen from an Atheros PDF at:

formatting link
some additions and corrections by me.

Non-overlapping Modulation Max Max Max Channels ------- | Link TCP UDP | | | | |

802.11b 3 CCK 11 5.9 7.1 802.11g (with 802.11b) 3 OFDM/CCK 54 14.4 19.5 802.11g only 3 OFDM 54 24.4 30.5 802.11g turbo 1 OFDM 108 42.9 54.8 802.11a 13 OFDM 54 24.4 30.5 802.11a turbo 6 OFDM 108 42.9 54.8

The paper claims that encryption is enabled for these calculations, but my numbers seem to indicate that these number are for encryption disabled. Dunno for sure. The Max TCP and Max UDP are the theoretical maximum thruput rates.

It's difficult to estimate the effects of encryption on thruput. Rule of thumb is about 15% loss as compared to un-encrypted. The payload for WEP and WPA with RC4 encryption are identical. Only the key exchange uses a different algorithm, but the same number of packets.

WPA2 comes in various flavours and implimentations. AES encryption is usually done in hardware, but here are software implimentations. The all software implimentations tend to be somewhat slower but not much.

The method of authentication has absolutly no effect on thruput as it only happens perhaps once every hour or so.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Jeff Liebermann wrote... [cut]

Thanks, that was very helpful :-)

Reply to
Alex81

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