Improved Group Key Management with Host Mobility Protocol in Wireless Mobile Environment

Group communication as an efficient communication mechanism, in recent years has become popular. This is due to the increase in group applications and services. Group communication ensures efficient delivery of packets from one source to multiple recipients or many sources to multiple recipients. Group key management in a wireless environment has been an interesting challenge with group communication because of insecure communication channel. The security and integrity of group communication in a wireless environment is a challenge. One of the challenges with group communication is the mobility of group members. Member mobility is a challenge when designing a group key management scheme. There have been several attempts that have been made to design a secure group key management for wireless environment. Not so many successful attempts have towards wireless mobile environments to explicitly address the various challenges with dynamic mobility issue between multiple networks. This research proposes a GKM scheme that tackles mobility in group communication. The protocol is analyzed to assess security and performance requirements. The size of the group variation, the mobility rate variation are carefully observed to determine the impact on the average of rekeying messages generated at every event and also 1-affects-n phenomenon. The results achieved, shows that the proposed protocol outperforms other popular solutions with less number of rekeying messages per event and also less number of affected members per event. Backward and Forward security are preserved for moving members.