A Secured Service Level Negotiation In Ubiquitous Environments

The goal of the ubiquitous connectivity is to enable mobile users to be permanently and transparently connected to the Internet. These mobile users are often connected via wireless networks like Wi-Fi or WiMax and consuming services that require a high Quality of Service (QoS) level such as video on demand or voice over IP. The wireless access to these services may make the concerned communications vulnerable to security attacks because of the open medium on which these access technologies are based. Hence, in ubiquitous environments, we need to guarantee both QoS and security for mobile usersʹ communications. In such an environment, it becomes very difficult for service providers to satisfy these usersʹ needs. A solution is to assign a profile to each user in order to optimize and automate the process of service level negotiation which enables guaranteeing QoS and security.In this paper, we present a protocol for service level negotiation which uses Web Services and includes both QoS and security in its negotiation. Then, we propose to adapt it to ubiquitous environments by basing its processing on the user profile and by specifying collaboration with the IEEE 802.21 standard, which manages the mobility of users and participates in the creation of theirs profiles. After that, we provide the negotiation flow of this protocol with security features using WSS, SSL and IPSec. Since, these security protocols may have an impact on the negotiation protocol performances; we will also evaluate this impact. Test results and implementation aspects are also shown in this paper.