A security protocol intended to ease QoS management in IP networks

Many research projects and implementations related to QoS (Quality of Service) management technologies for providing stable network services have been undertaken. To perform QoS management, traffic classes are required. Generally, traffic is classified by setting priorities for packets, and the methods of setting those priorities include passive admission control in which clients set priorities and active admission control in which network edge routers check traffic and set priorities. To perform active admission control, identification information such as a TCP or UDP header must be inspected. However, with existing security protocols such as ESP (Encapsulating Security Payload) or SSH (Secure Shell), these kinds of information cannot be inspected because they are encrypted. Based on the point of view that active admission control should be performed to simplify QoS management of IP networks, the authors of this paper propose a security protocol named ESPQ (ESP considered QoS) for constructing active admission controllable packets and investigate the stability of that protocol. They also perform implementation experiments to show that existing control equipment such as routers can perform QoS management of ESPQ packets. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 87(2): 47–58, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjb.10215