Considering Security and Quality of Service in SLS to Improve Policy-Based Management of Multimedia Services

This paper proposes to improve policy-based management by integrating security parameters into the service level specification (SLS). Integrating those parameters in the QoS part of the service level agreement (SLA) specification is of particular importance for multimedia services requiring security since QoS is negotiated when the multimedia service is deployed. Security mechanisms need to be negotiated at that time when sensible multimedia information is exchanged. In this paper we show that including security parameters in SLA specification improves the negotiation and deployment of security and QoS policies for multimedia services. The parameters this paper proposes to integrate have the advantage to be understandable by end-users and service providers.