The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standards(a guideline, standards specification, etc). The IETF is organized into a large number of working groups and informal discussion groups (BoF)s, each dealing with a specific topic. The Benchmarking Methodology Working Group (BMWG) will continue to produce a series of recommendations concerning the key performance characteristics of internetworking technologies, or benchmarks for network devices, systems, and services.
RFC 3511 discusses and defines a number of tests that may be used to describe the performance characteristics of firewalls. It covers ten items in four areas: forwarding, connection, latency and filtering. We can use this standard as a guideline to make an objective evaluation for the performance of firewalls. In this paper, we discussed testing methodologies of RFC 3511. And then examined the IP throughput and the concurrent connections for Firewall. We also tested TCP connection throughput.