Energy Consumption Analysis in Networking: IPSec Tunnels Comparison with Different Encryption and Authentication Methods

A VPN tunnel is typically used in commercial scenarios to provide secure communication channels over public infrastructure such as the Internet. The VPN tunnel, in its operation, is influenced by encryption and authentication protocols and algorithms. These algorithms, depending on their complexity, use computational resources that generate a specific energy consumption. Today, the conscious use of electrical energy is one of the main axes in contributing to reducing the environmental impacts caused by electrical generation. This article seeks to measure the electrical power and energy consumption of three configuration scenarios, both in phase 1 and phase 2, of an IPSec VPN tunnel, where the encryption algorithms (AES128, AES192 and AES256) and authentication (SHA-1, SHA-256 and SHA-512) are varied. To measure power and energy consumption, the methodology detailed in the ETSI ES 203 184 v1.1.1 standard is used. The result shows that the scenario where AES256 encryption algorithms and SHA-512 authentication were used, demands an energy consumption of 0.4% more than the IPSec VPN configuration of scenario 2 (AES192 and SHA-256) and 1.2% more than scenario 1 configuration (AES128 and SHA-1).