Two critical problems urgently needed to be resolved in the 11n draft wireless routing (1)

Although, as stated by the author, some 802.11n wireless routers may suffer performance degradation to varying degrees when dealing with mixed network and security settings, considering that the formal 802.11n standard has not yet been released, this is also an understandable phenomenon, and Xiao Bian believes that for most ordinary home users, there are not many wireless clients connected to wireless routers, the bandwidth requirements are not very high. Therefore, the performance reduction mentioned in this article does not affect our normal use in most cases, if you like to experience 802.11n products in advance, you can enjoy it.

The 802.11n wireless standards fully loaded with the desire of wireless enthusiasts have gradually become clear. The products under the standard draft have also given people a high-speed wireless connection speed, various media have successively launched a publicity campaign on the 11n draft product, which made many friends unable to help but want to make a major wireless upgrade at the end of the year. However, I need to remind my friends that, maybe the reality is not as perfect as you think.

If you have thoroughly evaluated 802.11n wireless products, you may already know the "little secret" behind them. This is what I want to talk about in this article, I would like to give you some suggestions for those who are preparing to taste the draft 802.11n product at the end of the year, but their understanding of the draft 11n product is still at the advertising level: let your 11g wireless router continue to run in parallel with your new 11n wireless router. Do not discard the old devices completely.

The secret is that the current consumer routers of many 11n drafts are doing very poorly in handling two things: Support for hybrid networks with 802.11g and 11n draft wireless Nic clients; support for security encryption, such as WEP and WPA/TKIP, is slightly better for WPA2.

Performance Degradation of hybrid networks with 11n and 11g NICs

If a single Wireless LAN is built using 802.11g or 802.11n products separately, the latter will certainly do much better than the former, however, most home users still have 11G wireless network cards in their laptops. Therefore, building a hybrid network is a realistic problem. In this hybrid network, the network speed may decrease for both 11g and 11n. We will illustrate this problem through demonstration of three devices.

The following test shows the situation when the 11n draft Nic and the standard 11g NIC are connected to a 11n draft wireless router at the same time.

A d-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N Gigabit router is connected to a D-Link DWA-652 laptop wireless Nic and a Linksys WPC54G laptop wireless Nic. Both DIR-655 and DWA-652 use the Atheros XSPAN chip solution, while WPC54G is an 802.11g Chip Based on Broadcom Airfoce.

D-Link DIR-655 to connect a mix of 11n, standard 11g NICs-Upstream

As you can see, the 11n draft and the standard 11g Nic each have a 50% discount on throughput. Although there is only one 11g client, the performance cost of the wireless network is very high. The throughput of at least 11n connections decreases significantly when the 11g Nic has data transmission, and the situation is better when the 11g Nic is idle.