A Multi-Layer Security Enabled Quality of Service (QoS) Management Architecture

Service-oriented architectures are dynamic, flexible and compositional in nature. Security and Quality of Service (QoS) management are two significant challenges for Service-Oriented-Architectures (SOA) in a multi-domain environment. We have researched and developed a SOA based QoS framework architecture and implemented a facility according to the architecture. This facility implementation consists of a set of QoS management services with XML-based policy driven resource management techniques, monitoring and diagnostics, and adaptation mechanisms. It is built on a publish/subscribe based middleware and has been successfully demonstrated in an enterprise testbed environment. We have expanded the QoS architecture to include QoS Security characteristics that incorporates the concept of Multi- Level Security (MLS). We call this expanded architecture a QoS-MLS architecture. This architecture addresses the security and QoS challenges in a coherent and integrated approach for enterprise SOA. In this paper we describe this QoS- MLS architecture which is the result of the integration of MLS into a QoS Management facility at the middleware layer. Keywords: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Multi-Layer Security (MLS), Quality of Service (QoS)