A Study on the Performance of ZeroTier Tunnel and CloudFlare WARP

Abstract

Remote work and cloud computing through traditional VPN systems face limitations and are increasingly exposed to emerging cybersecurity threats. To address these challenges, the Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) has been developed as an alternative. Based on this new architectural model, several products have been introduced, such as ZeroTier (ZT) Tunnel and Cloudflare (CF) WARP. Each solution applies different mechanisms in managing network traffic and data, which may impact system performance differently. This study aims to compare the performance of ZeroTier Tunnel and Cloudflare WARP in terms of round-trip time (RTT), data transmission rate  (DTR) during upload/download data, and CPU and RAM resource utilization. The experiment simulated client-to-server communication using the FTP protocol under two scenarios (ZT Tunnel and CF WARP) and employed Apache JMeter as the data recording tool. The experimental results show that ZT Tunnel outperforms CF WARP in RTT and data transmission rate (DRT) better than CF WARP, while CF WARP use less resources than ZT tunnel during upload but more during download compared to ZT Tunnel, both still have efficient CPU and RAM utilization. However, external factors such as network conditions and testing environments may influence the outcomes. Therefore, further experiments under diverse environments are recommended to validate the findings.