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.