Virtual Private Network—Firewall Integration for Wireless Local Area Network Improvement against Jammers

Abstract

Wireless networks are susceptible to many security problems since the wireless medium is open. Jammer (jamming attack) is the most important problems in wireless networks. It is denial-of-service attack in which attackers send malicious signals or messages on a channel that is intended for normal traffic by intentionally interfering with the network. One of the solutions is the development of tunneling technology as an attempt to secure communication networks. Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunneling technology when integrated with firewall would provide a suitable security. In this study, number of Jammers would interfere with the normal operation of the network resulting in performance degradation of network. These Jammers decrease throughput and increase delay and data dropped. The aim of this study is to improve the performance of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) by integrating Firewall with VPN in number of different Riverbed Modeler simulation scenarios which it is utilized in this study for video and data applications. Firewall is a technology employed to regulate the level of network connectivity. It can block unauthorized access from an external network to an internal network’s resources. In this study, the tunneling technology of VPN was integrated with firewall to improve the performance by increasing the throughput and decreasing delay and data dropped. The firewall would block any access to the server from the workstations and the VPN would filter the packets to allow a specific access to the specific server. The results showed that VPN when integrated with firewall increased the throughput from 1,350,000 to 1,500,000 bits/sec and decreased the delay from 0.0054 sec to 0.0047 sec and data dropped from 7,800 to 5,000 bits/sec so that this study proved that VPN incorporated with firewall provides a good throughput and delay improvement for wireless local area network.