Security and quality of service in communication networks

With the ubiquitous reach of the Internet, providing secure services over the communication networks has induced more challenges in addition to the requirements of quality of service (QoS) of a wide variety of applications. More importantly, security mechanisms, such as authentication, trust management, and key distribution are deployed at the expense of QoS because of implementation and communication overhead. Therefore, there exists a need for network designers to integrate security protocols in the Internet, while providing the required QoS in terms of bandwidth, delay, jitter, and reliability. A similar increase in wireless networks spanning from sensor networks to cellular systems has also demanded stringent tradeoff between security services and QoS. Both these factors have resulted in a sharply growing demand by service providers for the development of techniques that will enable them to offer communication services adaptive to voice and data services. Therefore, design and evaluation of security protocols and mechanisms for different network architectures and applications becomes a fundamental issue in providing secure, reliable, and satisfactory communications.