NETWORK SECURITY AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF ML- IPsec OVER SATELLITE NETWORKS

The peculiar characteristics of the satellite links affect performance of the TCP protocol, largely used by most of the Internet applications. Then, to achieve good performance TCP Performance Enhancing Proxy mechanisms are often used. In principle, a TCP PEP mechanism accelerates TCP transfers requiring access to TCP headers in intermediate nodes. As a drawback, this conflicts with IPsec, which requires end to end semantic be respected. ML-IPsec has been identified as a suitable trade-off solution which can mitigate such a conflict. This paper addresses security issues for satellite systems highlighting the need to guarantee both security and performance. Finally, performance of different security schemes, carried out through simulations, are shown.