An Encoded Key Management Scheme for Wireless Multicast Networks.

Key management in mobile multicast communication generally involves variety of issues due to the convergence of wireless and mobile technologies. Users could subscribe to the services while they are ubiquitous. However, the existing group key management (GKM) protocols intend to secure group communication for just a single group service. The GKM approaches involve inefficient use of keys and communication overheads, hence unsuitable for multiple multicast group environment. A novel GKM protocol for multiple multicast groups, called slot based multiple group key management (SMGKM) scheme using encoding is being proposed. SMGKM supports the movement of single and multiple members across a homogeneous or heterogeneous wireless network while participating in multiple group services with minimized communication overheads. Unlike conventional GKM protocols, SMGKM protocol can mitigate one- affect-n phenomenon, single point of failure and investment pressure of signalling load caused by rekeying at the core network. To provide backward confidentiality, a 256 bit hash encoding technique is used when rekeying is done as users move from one cluster to another.Analysis of results shows that the communication overhead incurred is less in SMGKM scheme while packet delivery ratio and throughput are high in SMGKM scheme compared to conventional schemes