Exploring the security requirements for quality of service in combined wired and wireless networks

In the modern era of Internet, providing Quality of Service (QoS) is a challenging issue, particularly in resourceconstrained wireless networks with delay-sensitive multimedia traffic. Real-time and multimedia services are now available to end-users over wired networks, Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), and Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs). While the usual trend is to provide the best possible QoS for these services, it is also imperative to deploy security requirements along with the QoS parameters. In this paper, we argue that the existing approaches for including security parameters (such as encryption/decryption key lengths) with QoS parameters (e.g., end-to-end delay requirements) lead to further security risks and consequently fail to provide an adequate solution. Through simulations, we point out the pitfalls of integrating delay and security support in the contemporary approaches. We also envision QoS2, a framework integrating both quality of security and QoS, in order to provide possible solutions for solving these problems. We also demonstrate via simulation the effectiveness and strength of our adopted approach.