Heterogeneous key management protocol for secure group communications in MANETS

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an architecture without fixed infrastructure or centralized administration. However, when a message is transmitted in a multicast group, without any security infrastructure, it may be attacked or corrupted. In this paper we propose a new key management mechanism to support secure group multicast communications in ad hoc networks. The scheme proposes a dynamic construction of hierarchical clusters based on a novel density function adapted to frequent topology changes. The presented mechanism ensures a fast and efficient key management with respect to the sequential 1 to n multicast service.