Performance analysis of application layer firewall

Nowadays organizations are likely to have Internet presence and this has led to a significant increase in all kinds of network attacks. Network security became one of the highest priorities to protect valuable data from unauthorized access. One of the solutions to protect against illegal access is to use a firewall. A firewall is a device designed to permit or deny network traffic. This paper will investigate the performance of firewall based on two main factors, namely response time and link utilization. Various scenarios were considered to show the impact of firewall in network performance using the OPNET simulation program.