Analysis of Traditional Secure Group Key Management Schemes in Secure Multi-group Communication

In wireless sensor networks, several group key management schemes have been proposed for secure group communication. But they are intended to work in single multicast group only. Issues arise when the number of groups increases and users belong to more than one group. Due to the nature of wireless sensor networks, the occurrence of multi-group scenario is apparent in the deployed applications and key management becomes a challenging task when multi-group scenario exists. In this paper, we analyzed the performance of existing group key management schemes in the multi-group settings. This work shows that the rekeying complexity in multiple groups increases by the order of the number of groups a user is part of and the existing efficient group key management schemes perform poorly in these settings.