ENHANCING NETWORK PERFORMANCE AND SECURITY: A Load Balancing and Firewall Approach

This research is based on existing Salapungan Elementry School wireless campus network which has to deal with large amount of data packets transfer daily between four different building of a vast network. The access points do provide fast connectivity to the students and teaching staff but when far apart building needs to communicate with each other, the network lags and doesn’t give a faster output. Also, the network is open to attacks like virus spread and DDOS as the server ports are open and can be pinged from anywhere in the network. Intruder if accessed one part of the network, will down the system completely. To improve the performance of the system in high traffic hours, we applied HSRP based load-balancing using multiple groups so easy passage way is provided to the packets as alternative if the four connected routers are facing bottleneck. For the security of the campus network, we introduced a host-based Firewall that created allow rule for IP and deny rule for ICMP so any possible attacks could be easily mitigated. The results showed impressive results as throughput was improved 0.1535 KBPS to 0.2647 KBPS i.e. an average of double in kbps based on two different scenarios and the security was made to 0% attack i.e. 5 of 5 packets blocked based on pinging using ICMP packets. Therefore, hostbased firewall approach and HSRP based load balancing approach has been proven as secure and efficient approaches to any upcoming networks based on wireless campus networks.