Efficient signal and protocol level security for network communication

Data communication over networks is of vital importance, nowadays. Different types of networks exist such as computer networks and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). So, there is a need for data security tools and efficient routing protocols for the networks. Images represent the most important type of data used over networks. So, there is a need for image security tools such as image encryption, watermarking, steganography, and forgery detection. This paper presents efficient algorithms for securing image communication over networks including algorithms for watermarking of encrypted images, steganography of images, and forgery detection if some sort of tampering has been performed on the images. In addition, two routing protocols are considered in this paper to address the bandwidth utilization problems in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks: the Multi-Protocol Label Switching-Traffic Engineering (MPLS-TE) and the DiffServ Quality of Service (QoS). The objective of studying the performance of these protocols is to set up high-efficiency network topologies to guarantee the flexible transfer of secure data, especially images, over the networks of interest. The MPLS controls the path of the data by utilizing the unused bandwidth, and the DiffServ QoS controls the traffic produced by different users in the network. Hence, the data which is labled as “important” can be routed in a more secure path with less congestion to make sure that the data is delivered flexibly and securely. Multiple experiments are presented with different variations using one or more of the DiffServ-aware MPLS TE, Low Latency Queuing (LLQ), Russian Dolls Model (RDM) and Maximum Allocation Model (MAM) on data, which may be image data. The best results for both IPv4 and IPv6 were obtained using DiffServ-aware TE in RDM model in conjunction with LLQ.