Optimized Firewall with Traffic Awareness

Firewall is one of the well known network-based security devices that have been widely used since the initial days of computer network security. Firewall is designed to allow or reject network traffic depending on firewall rules that displays the types of packets should be accepted or rejected in protected network. Currently growth complexity in network is high and it's very common to find firewall policies consisting of many rules.

Packet filtering is the one of the major contemporary firewall design techniques. An important design goal is to arrive at the decision at the packet only [1]. Firewall access rule list consists of rules which are sequentially checked. This implies that firewall filtering overhead and costing will be higher when the order of the matching rules is higher. Hence it is vital, to minimize the filtering overhead. It's critical to have necessary ordering of rules in the firewall rule set. Firewall validates all inbound and outbound packets by analyzing data packet and then by comparing packets with many firewall rules, that defines whether to accept or discard the traffic. It is very important to improve the firewall policies to improve performance of network.