Bandwidth Efficient Key Management for Secure Multicast in Clustered Wireless Networks

In the near future, various multicast based services will be provided over clustered wireless networks. To provide multicast services in secure manner, multicast messages are encrypted by using group key which is shared by group members. Therefore, various group key management schemes have been introduced until now. Among them, tree based approach is one of the most representative paradigms in group key management. Traditional tree based approaches effectively reduce rekeying message transmissions of the key distribution center. However, they do not consider the network bandwidth used for transmitting the rekeying messages. In this paper, we firstly present formulas that describe bandwidth consumption of tree based group key management scheme. Based on our formulations, we propose a bandwidth efficient key tree management scheme for clustered wireless networks where membership changes occur frequently. Simulation results show that our scheme effectively reduces the bandwidth consumption used for rekeying compared to existing key tree schemes.