Abstract
Too many security protocols were developed to provide solutions for security aspects that are required to support the revolutionary services appearing on the Internet. However, almost no effort has been made to integrate or coordinate these technologies. This study analyzes the relationship among these different protocols with respect to the promising IPsec protocol. It also identifies the requirements for the integration among them. This study concludes by proposing a mechanism that allows upper layer security protocols to interact with IPsec in order to achieve the necessary integration and improve the overall system performance.