Improving the security for the wireless LAN network is the key study area in this paper and to achieve this two scenarios are created using the OPNET modeler simulation tool. First scenario deals with the default wireless LAN configuration and the second scenario deals with the secure wireless LAN configuration. A MANET is simulated for these purposed and 10 wireless LAN mobile nodes are used and a single wireless LAN server is created to support these nodes.
OLSR routing protocol is used for routing purpose and three applications are created in these scenarios to generate the traffic and they are video, voice and FTP and they generate the CBR and TCP traffic respectively. When the two scenarios are created they are simulated and the results are analyzed and from the analysis few observations are derived and they are as given below
When all the scenarios are compared against the performance metrics used, it is observed the performance of the secure wireless LAN is high when compared to the normal wireless LAN configuration. Key aspects like FTP, Voice, Video and Wireless LAN metrics are compared against the scenarios and across all the comparison process the secure wireless LAN parameters has imposed an optimal conditions on the network in terms of routing, traffic sent, traffic received, jitter, load and delay.
From this indication it is understood that if the parameters of the wireless LAN are changes to ensure the safety across the network then the overall performance of the network is improved a lot across any application used in the network. Secure wireless LAN settings has ensured a optimal packet delivery ratio, reduced the congestion on the network by minimizing the traffic sent and received across the nodes and thus it is proved that wireless LAN performance is optimized with the required security considerations.