Performance Evaluation for Remote Access VPN on Windows Server 2003 and Fedora Core 6

A virtual private network (VPN) can be defined as 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. VPN systems provide users with the illusion of a completely private network. This work examines and empirically evaluates the remote access VPN protocols, 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 protocols on end-to-end user application performance using metrics such as throughput, RTT, jitter, and packet loss. All experiments were conducted using a Windows XP SP/2 host (VPN client) connected to a Windows Srver 2003 host (VPN server) and to a Fedora Core 6 host (VPN server).