Topological Decoupled Group Key Management for Cellular Networks

Problem statement: The continuous increasing capacity of the cellular networks motivates the development of multiparty applications, such as interactive mobile TV and mobile social networks. For these environments, security group services are required. A practical way to provide security services is by using cryptographic methods. However, the key management needed for these methods, which considers a dynamic group membership, introduces a high communication and storage overheads. Approach: In this study we propose an efficient group key management scheme suitable for cellular networks. Results: Our scheme reduces the number of keys to be transmitted and to be stored at a mobile host in the presence of membership changes. The scheme is based on a two tier structure to organize the cells in areas and the mobile hosts in clusters within an area. The main objective of the two tier structure is to dissociate, in an advantageous manner, the mobile hosts’ distribution from the topological network. Conclusion: Our approach offers security services to a large number of mobile hosts by using lower cryptographic resources, thus providing us a more efficient key updating process.