Simulation based performance evaluation of a user-centric group rekeying protocol

Most of the actual group rekeying solutions only deal with security and scalability issues and are severely lacking with respect to reliability and customer satisfaction. We suggested a reliable group rekeying protocol whereby the key server first partitions members with respect to their membership duration and offers a strongly reliable delivery for long-lived members. In this paper, we review this protocol that combines proactive FEC and replication techniques, describe a user-oriented key assignment scheme in order to define FEC blocks. We then analyze the efficiency of the protocol based on different simulations and show that thanks to this protocol, the number of long-lived members losing their keying material is significantly reduced while the communication overhead has slightly increased.