Network Performance Analysis of VPN Protocols: An Empirical Comparison on Different Operating Systems

Virtual Private Network (VPN) is commonly used in business situations to provide secure communication channels over public infrastructure such as Internet. This is because these networks can be set-up with a lower cost of ownership compared to other means of securing communications. VPN is a proven technology that does provide security strong enough for business use. However, performance of these networks is also important in that lowering network and server resources can lower costs and improve user satisfaction. In this research we evaluate performance of three operating systems (Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Linux Fedora Core 6) on a test-bed set-up and observe their network performance with different VPN tunnels protocols and algorithms. It is found that the three operating systems give different performance metrics values for various combinations of the variables. Linux consumes the greatest network resources; however its VPN throughput values band together much closely than Windows environment.