VPN Solution Benchmarking for Endpoints Under Fast Network Mobility

This dissertation was proposed by Veniam, a start-up working on vehicular networks. Offering connectivity to moving things over different technologies (DSRC, Wi-Fi, or 4G LTE) while maintaining a good quality of experience for users is a challenging endeavour. In some cases, the use of a VPN can solve many of the issues. However, many popular VPN solutions were developed with a different use case in mind - the out of office worker. These solutions cannot handle mobility well, breaking connections when access points switch, and require considerable processing power. Applying these solutions to the fast moving, low resource devices deployed in Veniam connected fleets results in a severely degraded service. Therefore, other VPNs will be researched and compared, in order to benchmark and pick a suitable VPN solution. The VPN's overhead, namely throughput degradation, latency increase, and CPU usage will be measured, and its capacity to adapt to fast switching over heterogenous networks evaluated. The benchmark results will allow the minimisation of service degradation caused by the use of VPN tunnels in this constrained mobile environment