Efficient key tree construction for group key agreement in ad hoc networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a highly efficient group key agreement scheme based on a novel key tree construction for ad hoc networks. The key tree is constructed taking into consideration of the multicast tree which represents the underlying network topology. Our scheme greatly reduces the communications and computation cost for group key agreement and has high flexibility in handling dynamic group members hips. We implement our scheme in ns-2 and evaluate its performance in terms of overhead and communication cost. The simulation results show that our scheme enjoys great advantages over other schemes in the literature. © 2006 IEEE.