A Hybrid Group Rekey Architecture for Multicast Communication

In Multicast communication, the group rekeying protocols follow either centralized or decentralized architecture. The centralized architecture suffers from the 1 affects n phenomenon while the decentralized architecture suffers from the translation latency. This proposed work HGRA (hybrid group rekey architecture) introduces a novel rekeying architecture which provides a good tradeoff between 1 affects n phenomenon and translation latency. This hybrid architecture controls the number of subgroups in the group by calculating the rekeying costs during join/leave event. This work allows the subgroups to merge or a subgroup to divide into two subgroups by comparing the cost of translation latency due to splitting and the cost of 1 affects n phenomenon due to merging.