Adaptive Reorientation Method for Performance Enhancement in Network Firewalls

Firewall plays a crucial role in network defense and perimeter security. The performance of such a firewall greatly depends on number of rules processed per packet and the order of the rules as well. In this paper an Adaptive Reorientation Method (ARM) was proposed, which will calculate the weight of each rule, after few cycles of traffic simulations. The rules are then reoriented according to their weights. The firewall is configured using several Access Control Lists (ACL) and using the ARM priority of the rules are calculated and are reoriented accordingly. The performance of the firewall is evaluated and compared before and after orientation.