A Comparative Study on Virtual Private Networks for Future Industrial Communication Systems

The future industrial networks will not be created from scratch. Rather, they will grow from existing installations without displacing legacy components. The secure integration of these legacy machines and networks will become an important building block in order to realize the vision of Industry 4.0. Secure and high performance virtual private networks (VPNs) will be necessary for that purpose.Therefore, we investigated and compared various VPN solutions. Their performance was tested on multiple hardware platforms ranging from very resource constrained to very powerful. Non-functional aspects, relating around security, manageability and ease of use, were discussed in order to assess their suitability for future use cases.We arrive at clear recommendations on which software VPN solutions to choose for future industrial setups.