Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) is a Layer-2 VPN technology used to connect geographically separated sites as if they were on the same local network. With the introduction of security mechanisms like Host Identity Protocol (HIP), it becomes possible to securely connect distributed networks with identity-based communication, which gives a robust way of connecting and protecting business networks.

This thesis evaluates how HIP-based secure VPLS scales and how the performance compares to plain IP-based communication. The study is performed with the help of Airwall for the HIP-based communication, which is a technology that enables users to create secure overlay networks with similar characteristics to VPLS. By using the SLICES-RI research platform, multiple virtual machines were spawned across geographically dispersed sites, and by generating both tunneled HIP-traffic and normal IP traffic, a performance comparison could be performed. Scenarios with different geographical setups and number of sites were tested and metrics such as throughput, latency, and jitter were collected and analyzed.

The results indicate a noticeable performance overhead of using HIP-based VPLS in both throughput and latency. In the test scenarios, HIP-based traffic adds on average 1-5 ms in latency compared to IP and is limited to a maximum of 200 Mbps. The reason for this behavior is theorized to be the cryptographic and control-plane overhead introduced by HIP and VPLS, which is supported by theory. The results provide insights into HIP-based VPLS performance and the potential trade-offs when used in business networks.