Högskolan i Skövde

As the performance of PCs is increasing it is of great interest to use these cheap devices as routers,which traditionally consisted of more expensive and customized hardware for that purpose. Thesoftware was also traditionally proprietary and thereby costly, but as the open source communityhas grown there have been development of open source solutions that can perform the task ofacting as a router. However as there are so many solutions out there, it can be hard for the potentialusers to choose which particular solution to use, without having to put in too much work intogetting a fully functional router solution. This study achieved this purpose by benchmarking themost popular open source software routers, in terms of performance and scalability as well asproviding a brief analysis of their basic security features. The routers that were studied wasClearOS, Untangle NG Firewall and IPFire, and after the study was complete IPFire was consideredthe superior with ClearOS as the second and Untangle as third and last.