A Survey on the Implementation and Management of Secure Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and Virtual LANs (VLANs) in Static and Mobile Scenarios

Nowadays, the demand for connection between the remote offices of a company, or between research locations, and constantly increasing work mobility (partly due to the current pandemic emergency) have grown hand in hand with the quality and speed of broadband connections. The logical consequence of this scenario is the increasingly widespread use of Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections. They allow one to securely connect the two ends of a connection via a dedicated network, typically using the Internet and reducing the costs of Content Delivery Network (CDN) lines (dedicated connections). At the same time, Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) are able to decrease the impact of some scalability issues of large networks. Given the background above, this paper is focused on overviewing and surveying the main progresses related to VPNs and VLANs in wireless networks, by collecting the most important contributions in this area and describing how they can be implemented. We state that security issues in VLANs can be effectively mitigated through the combination of good network-management practices, effective network design and the application of advanced security products. However, obviously, the implementation of VPNs and VLANs poses specific issues regarding information and network security; thus some good solutions are also surveyed.