Impact of Firewalls on IEEE.802.11a, b, g, n WiFi Releases Networks

Networks security has been a serious issue in recent years, especially in WLANs which is more vulnerable to attack than other wired networks. Now a days WLANs cannot be avoided so studies must be taken to find the best security solutions to protect the WLANs and try to minimize the negative effect of these solutions on the network performance. This paper analyzes the impact of firewall on IEEE 802.11a, b, g & n wifi releases regarding the delay and throughput in traffic between the wireless nodes and the server using OPNET 17.5 WLAN utility. Two scenarios for each release have been introduced and simulated, with firewall and without firewall.