Design and Development of an Emulation Model for VPN and VPN Bonding

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have become indispensable for organizations seeking secure remote network access, with a significant rise in their adoption. While the COVID-19 pandemic initially fueled the surge in remote work and VPN usage, the trend has continued post-pandemic as organizations increasingly opt for hybrid work models. VPNs allow users to establish secure connections to their organization’s network from any location, ensuring the confidentiality of transmitted data. Moreover, VPN bonding, which combines multiple VPN connections into a unified interface, improves performance and reliability, particularly in areas with limited Internet connectivity. As the usage of VPN and VPN bonding technologies continues to expand, a growing demand arises for research in this field, and consequently, the need for robust emulators and simulators. However, existing network emulators or simulators currently lack comprehensive support for VPN-related technologies. To address these limitations, this paper aims to develop intuitive and user-friendly Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for emulating VPN and VPN bonding in Network Stack Tester (NeST), a powerful Python package designed to facilitate network emulation for experienced researchers and individuals new to the field. This work utilizes OpenVPN, a secure tunneling daemon, to integrate the support of VPN emulation in NeST. By augmenting the capabilities of NeST, this work intends to provide researchers with a valuable toolset for exploring and testing VPN and VPN bonding technologies across diverse network environments.