Investigation of TCP Throughput Performance in Wired and Wireless IPV4 Networks

Abstract

In telecommunication networks, end to end throughput and delay of the transmission medium poses a major challenge and most recently with the tremendous increase in the use of the internet, quality of services like, voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and live video streaming becomes major challenges. In network scenarios where wired and wireless networks are connected together, the measure of two performance metrics, throughput and delay are crucial to network engineers for planning purposes in network service deployment. This paper presents a network performance analysis of transport control protocol (TCP) throughput and delay in wired and wireless internet protocol 4 (IPV4) local area networks. Wireshark software was used for the network traffic measurement. Microsoft Excel software was used for statistical analysis and computation of the network throughput efficiency. Empirical models were developed to predict throughput and delay and performance assessments were carried out. From the results obtained the IEEE 802.3 wired LAN exhibited higher throughput efficiency and less end to end delay as compared to its IEEE 802.11g WLAN counterpart. This shows that wired networks are much more preferable to be deployed where peak speeds are a key requirement.