ent and network protection as reusable service components which can readily be combined with other service enablers to provide multimedia services with managed QoS. The network functionalities, though vendor-specific in the way they are configured and controlled, are exposed in a generic and standard way via the IMS framework, as shown in Figure 9.2. The Network Service is a suite of services that abstract the Service Delivery Platforms Network Presence Adaptor service service object Connection Indirection service service service Protection Security Priority service service service JBoss microcontainer Vendor-specific Proprietary Optical network control and management plane Figure 9.2 Network service exposed as standard IMS service. network functionalities SO as to allow users to request managed optical Ethernet connections with dedicated bandwidth and other properties such as user authenti- cation and data integrity. The Network Service includes the following basic service modules: Connection Service: Supports end-to-end and multipoint LAN connections. Through this service, connections may be established, modified (e.g., nodes join or leave a multipoint connection), or released. QoS Service: Enables the specification of quality of service parameters for individual/multiple traffic flows or connections (e.g., bandwidth and avail- ability guarantees). Priority Service: Allows multiple traffic flows to share a link or a switch port, and assigns different transmission priorities to individual traffic flows. Protection Service: Provides different types of path protection, being shared or dedicated protection, full protection, or partial protection. Security Service: Provides user authentication and data encryption/decryption service for the established connections. 9.2.5 Security Service The security server SECS is implemented in our improved IMS-based architecture as shown in Figure 9.3 to provide security services. SECS provides security services such as two-party key management, group key management, data origin a