Characterizing the Impacts of VPN Security Models on Streaming Video

Video-based communications are becoming more important within domains, such as health care, that have stringent security and privacy requirements for data. VPN-based encryption is a now common part of organizational security architectures. It is expected that the time required to perform encryption at a VPN concentrator and decryption at the client side video may add significant overhead to the transmission of real-time video, which is already delay-sensitive. The real impacts of this overhead on Quality of user Experience are not well-understood. This paper describes experimental methods for measuring the network-level impacts of virtual private network (VPN) encryption on real-time video in wired and wireless networks. It also presents experimental results using these methods. This paper concludes that VPN-based encryption introduces significant latency to real-time video and that further analysis is warranted to characterize the transitive impacts of such latency on the quality of user experience.