Performance comparison of VPN tunneling nn GRE, IPSec and GRE over IPSec Using GNS3

Virtual Private Network (VPN) have become essential for secure communication over public networks. There are few protocols that can be implement in VPN, that establish a secured data communication. However, the continuous evolution of cybercriminal activities poses a significant threat to the security of sensitive data, necessitating the implementation of robust security mechanisms. Moreover, GRE is a tunneling protocol that only encapsulates packets within IP packets between network devices and does not have built-in security mechanisms. On the other hands, IPSec offers various security management capabilities and supports authentication and cryptographic key negotiation make the algorithm more complex. Besides, the performance of GRE and IPSec may degrade with an increase in the number of users and also when to scalable the network, it can leads to fragmentation issues that susceptible to certain network performance. This problem leads to the issues of network performance for both VPN protocol, thus limiting the potential used of GRE and IPSec protocol when implementing in network environment. This research simulated the performance comparison of VPN tunnelling on GRE, IPSec, and GRE over IPSec using GNS3. Simulation results of the GRE, IPSec, and GRE over IPSec VPN protocol indicates that these VPN protocol has remarkable performance in terms of its average throughput, average latency, and also average jitter in various VPN scenarios. For the future work, simulation of GRE-Based VPN tunnelling over IPSec with more additional VPN scenarios and network performance metrics can be carried out in order to gain deeper knowledges and understanding of the GRE, IPSec, and GRE over IPSec VPN protocol.