Quality of Protection with Performance Analysis in IP Multimedia Subsystem

IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) is considered as the main solution to the next generation multimedia communication.By examining potential security threats to IMS, we initiate a set of security policies for choice and consider their quality of protection (QoP) based on the strength of the security mechanism. In order to provide secure service to users, it is insufficient to just take the security benefits into consideration. An adequate analysis of the impact of security policies in IMS on the performance quantitatively is necessary and significant. We present a novel study of IMS performance using queuing Petri nets (QPN) to predict the system performance metrics, i.e., the signaling delay, server utilization, which then be used to evaluate the impacts of different security mechanism on system performance quantitatively. With the multi-view security partition introduced, multi-level security service can be provided to diverse users and applications for a best tradeoff between security requirements and system performance.