Performance Evaluation for Remote Access VPNs on Windows Server 2003

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) can be defined as a way to provide secure communication between members of a group through use of the public telecommunication infrastructure, maintaining privacy through the use of a tunneling protocol and security procedures. This work examines and empirically evaluates the remote access VPNs, namely Point to Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP), Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol over Internet Protocol Security (L2TP/IPSec), and Secure Socket Layer (SSL). We explore the impact of these VPNs on end-to-end user application performance using metrics such as throughput, RTT, jitter, and packet loss. All experiments were conducted using wired and wireless windows XP SP/2 host (VPN Client) connected to a windows server 2003 host (VPN Server).