The Implementation and Performance Analysis of Netfilter to Support User Interface on FSL3/4

FSL3/4 (flow separation by layer 3/4), a classification of NAT technology, supports the end-to-end connectivity and IPSEC (IP security protocol) that is not supported in the existing technology for IP address sharing. However, FSL3/4 does not provide a user interface. Furthermore, FSL3/4 lacks portability, forcing the user to change the source code and recompile the kernel to change the function. This paper introduces NIF (Netfilter implementation of FSL3/4) supporting the existing FSL3/4 to add the user interface. We show the performance comparison of NIF with the existing technologies for IP address sharing including the above-mentioned FSL3/4. The performance degradation of NIF was 3% and 2.4% compared with typical routing and FSL3/4, respectively. The result shows that the performance of NIF is slightly lower than FSL3/4. However, since the performance difference is slight, NIF is preferable considering that NIF greatly improves user's convenience and expandability which is the weakness of FSL