An efficient role-based access control mechanism for multicasting environments

In this paper, a new algorithm is introduced that relies on a role-based access control model to reduce the amount of redundant information sent in multicast sessions. The algorithm utilizes the active nodes located in the multicast tree to reduce the amount of bandwidth wasted when the different roles assumed by the receivers in the multicast session have overlapping data. The proposed algorithm is proven to be effective whether the data belonging to each role is encrypted or not. Complexity analysis shows that the proposed algorithm has a polynomial-time complexity. Meanwhile experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can satisfy the receivers´ requirements similar to the case where the data belonging to each role is sent in a separate multicast session while reducing the link utilization by 27% (38% in case of a higher degree of overlapping).