Traffic Flow Confidentiality mechanisms and their impact on traffic

Protected Core Networking [1] is an approach, aiming to provide a highly flexible and resilient network, to the users. The principles of PCN were established during IST-069 in 2009 and are currently being refined in IST-103. The work that this paper bases on is produced within the latter and focuses on one of the services that a Protected Core offers to its users, namely Traffic Flow Confidentiality (TFC). TFC includes functionality for hiding specifics of traffic-flows. Providing TFC on Ethernet may have a negative impact on traffic and thereby applications. A number of TFC-mechanisms will be explored and compared. The placement of TFC also plays a role in utilization of the network, if the users are doing TFC themselves or when it´s provided by the network. Results show that limited TFC can be provided in the network while achieving good performance for traffic. Whereas investigated mechanisms concealing packets and frames in a way that it resembles serial links, have a negative impact on traffic in certain setups. A proposal for a more sophisticated mechanism is discussed.