CPE-based IPsec VPNs have been widely used to provide secure private communication across the Internet. As the bandwidth of WAN links keeps growing, the bottleneck in a typical deployment of CPE-based IPsec VPNs has moved from the last-mile connections to the customer-edge security gateways. In this paper, we propose a clustering scheme to scale the throughput as required by CPE-based IPsec VPNs. The proposed scheme groups multiple security gateways into a cluster using a transparent

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... ching technique and allows as many gateways to be added as necessary until the resulting throughput is again limited by the bandwidth of the last-mile connections. It also includes a flow-migration mechanism to keep the load of the gateways balanced. The results of the performance evaluation confirm that the clustering technique and the traffic-redistribution mechanism together create a transparent, adaptive, and highly scalable solution for building high-performance IPsec VPNs.