
A fundamental problem that confronts virtual private network (VPN) applications is the overhead on throughput, ease of deployment and use, and overall utilization. WireGuard is a recently introduced light and secure cross-platform VPN application. It aims to simplify the process of setting up a secure connection while utilizing the multi-threading capability and minimizing the use of bandwidth. There have been several follow-up studies on WireGuard since its birth, most of which focus on the security analysis of the protocol. Despite the author's claim that WireGuard has impressive wins over OpenVPN and IPsec, there is no rigorous analysis of its performance to date. This paper presents a performance comparison of WireGuard and its main rival OpenVPN on various metrics. We construct an automated test framework and deploy it on a total of eight nodes, including remote AWS instances and local virtual machines. Our test results clearly show two main edges that WireGuard has over OpenVPN, its performance on multi-core machines and its light codebase.
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 20 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Top 10% | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% |
