On balance between security and performance for LTE wireless networks

The deployment of security measures and the provision of quality of service represents two critical and tightly coupled challenges in the design and operation of network services, architectures, and protocols in today´s converged communication networks. Security and performance are not necessarily proportional to each other. It is common that; high security measures lead to high reliability results. However over-dimensioned security measures can adversely affect the networks performance and thus the services´ quality of experience. For example a lightweight security algorithm may represent a security breach to an Ecommerce application. On the other hand, heavyweight algorithm could impact negatively the service performance. This paper presents a dynamic security system architecture that weighs the trade-off between resources, costs and risks for tuning the network security profile to optimize the performance of communication networks. The paper explores a framework to define the network security profile concept and identify its usage for security analysis and vulnerability assessment for enhancing the networks´ performance. A simulation model is developed using OPNET to ground the model analytics under heavy load conditions.