Optimizing Multicast Key Management for Cellular Multicasting

There has been significant advancements in building a global wireless infrastructure that will free users from the confines of static communication networks. Users will be able to access the Internet from anywhere at anytime. As wireless connections become ubiquitous, consumers will desire to have multicast applications running on their mobile devices. In order to meet such a demand, there has been increasing research efforts in the area of wireless multicast [75-77].

In wireless networks, where bandwidth is limited and transmission error rate is high, the design of key management schemes need to consider the transmission of the rekeying messages. When the design of key management schemes can take advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless media as well as the wireless network topology, the communication overhead introduced by key management can be reduced. As a direct consequence, the reliability of key distribution can be greatly improved.

In this chapter, some important properties of tree-based centralized key management scheme will be exploited. Based on these properties, the concept of topology-aware key management will be introduced. A specific design of such topology-aware key management scheme is then presented in detail, followed by performance evaluation.