Study and analysis of the internet protocol security and its impact on interactive communications

Abstract

Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) is the defacto standard, which offers secured Internet communications, providing traffic integrity, confidentiality and authentication. Besides this, it is assumed that IPSec is not suitable for the protection of realtime audio transmissions as the IPSec related enlargement of packets and the usage of the Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode contradict stringent requirements. IPSec overhead of at least 44 bytes for each Internet Protocol (IP)-packet cannot guarantee Quality of Service (QOS) due to a bad wireless link by which the Ethernet flow control intercepts and makes a real time transmission impossible. This paper presents a survey and analysis study of IPSec and its impact on interactive communication for securing voice and video packets with emphasis on three main domains: Implementation issues of IPSec, Computational and Protocol overhead of IPSec and finally discusses about the scalability issues of IPSec. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.