Need for integrated quality of service and quality of protection in mobile systems

Recent large scale disasters have awaken governments at home and abroad to their needs for preparedness to support homeland security and public safety. First responders of various agencies are often on the frontline to assist in managing these events to protect lives and property. The effectiveness of their mission is highly dependent on capability of mobile wireless systems available at incident scenes, especially how their mobile infrastructure and devices can handle real-time responses and protection against threads and vulnerabilities in an integrated manner.

In this talk, we present challenges to achieve such integration when taking into account resource limitations in mobile systems and possible threats at incident scenes under varying Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Protection demands. We will amplify these challenges on three examples: (a) key management issues, (b) alert mechanisms if threats are detected, and (c) trading QoS/QoP issues when streaming multimedia data among mobile devices. In case of the cryptographic key management issues, we will examine combinatorial key solutions within the scopes of symmetric key cryptography and public key cryptography and how they fare under resource limitations and possible threats. In case of alert mechanisms we will discuss solutions such as Mobi-Herald and examine it against resource limitations and possible threats. Trading QoS/QoP algorithms for allowing streaming data will be examined, especially how well they deliver data under end-to-end delay and confidentiality demands in these resource-constrained situations.