Private communication groups in packet-switched networks

Abstract

With the advent of information super-highways, the structure of communication networks is likely to evolve towards one composed of commercial network providers, commercial service providers, and clients subscribing to network services. Organizations (service providers and clients) would typically interconnect their local area networks using commercial backbone networks operated by network providers. We define a private communication group as a group including a service provider and its clients. A private communication group requires the same level of security from the backbone network that it can achieve by having a private network between the service provider and service clients. Organizations should be able to subscribe to several services dynamically. In this paper, we present a scheme that can be used to support private communication groups over a packet-switched backbone. The scheme is based on the notion of access-lists. It consists of three cooperating modules, a Filterer that enforces access-list restrictions, a Manager which ensures that access-lists are kept current, and an Administrator which allows the dynamic creation, deletion and modification of private communication groups. We describe how private communication groups can be supported by these three components, and identify some enhancements that can be made.