An analytical approach is proposed here to study scattering of deep water waves by a submerged or a surface piercing vertical porous barrier. It involves a connection between two wave potentials of which one is the solution of a boundary value problem associated with wave scattering by the porous barrier and the other is the solution of a complementary type problem where barrier and gap positions are interchanged and solid barrier takes the position of the porous barrier. The connection also involves an auxiliary or a connection wave potential. The potential for the solid barrier problem involves incident wave forcing while the auxiliary potential describes a solid barrier type problem that involves a non-physical forcing. The solution procedure of Ursell (Ursell, 1947) is chosen to solve these boundary value problems explicitly in the case of normal wave incidence as it also determines necessary exact behavior of the potential at the barrier edge. The reflection coefficients are also connected and the reflection amplitudes of the normally incident wave against the vertical porous barriers are obtained analytically. Numerical results for reflection and transmission coefficients are presented. © 2016 Elsevier B.V.