Quality of Service and security negotiation for autonomous management of Next Generation Networks

Abstract

Based on the IP technology, the next generation networks (NGN) must overcome the main drawbacks of this technology consisting in the lack of quality of service (QoS), security and mobility management. To ensure a service offer in an NGN environment, a protocol for negotiating a service level can be used. However, most of the existing negotiation protocols allow the establishment of a service level which includes only QoS. As for security and mobility, they were often not covered by these negotiations, and therefore managed independently. However, securing a service can cause degradation of the QoS, and the mobility of a user can change the service needs in terms of QoS and security. Thus, we need to simultaneously manage QoS and security while taking into account user’s mobility. In this context, we propose an end-to-end NGN architecture with several autonomous domains, where each domain is under the authority of an autonomic domain manager. We provide those autonomic managers with a negotiation capability to achieve an agreement between the different domains involved in the transport of various offered services. This agreement may cover different aspects such as QoS, security and takes into account the user profile. The negotiation process will be based on SLNP (Service Level Negotiation Protocol) which uses Web Services technologies in order to enable interoperability between the managers of the different autonomous domains involved in the service transport.