Adaptive Group Key Management Protocol for Wireless Communications

Group-oriented services and wireless communication networks are among the emerging technologies of the last few years. Group key management, which is an important building bloc in securing group communication, has received a particular attention in both academic and industry research communities. This is due to the economical relevance of group-based applications, such as video on demand, videoconferencing, collaborative work. The key management concerns the distribution and updates of the key material each time a member joins or leaves the group. The dynamic aspect of group applications due to free membership joins and leaves in addition to members’ mobility makes difficult the design of efficient and scalable key management protocols. Indeed, to secure group communication in mobile environment, the protocol must deal not only with dynamic group membership but also with dynamic member location. Thus, the challenges in designing secure and scalable key management protocols are: the dynamic updates of the key caused by frequent joins and leaves, the large size of the group and the mobility of group members. Many academic researches have addressed the first and the third challenges. However the mobility challenge has not been widely addressed. In this paper, we present our solution for group key management with a mobility support. Our protocol focuses on the above three challenges. It is highly scalable to dynamic groups and treats the nodes’ mobility with a null re-keying cost and keeps perfect backward and forward secrecies. Our simulation studies show that our protocol makes better performance compared to other protocols while reducing the overall overhead and the number of re-keying messages and has no security failures.