A New Group Key Agreement Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

A mobile ad hoc network is a collection of autonomous nodes that communicate with each other by forming a multi-top wireless network. Different from conventional wireless networks, the resource of the nodes in ad hoc networks is limited and there may be tens of thousands of low-power energy constrained nodes in ad hoc networks. As such, the costs of the nodes resource and the network size should be taken into consideration when constructing a group key agreement protocol in the ad hoc networks. In this paper, an efficient and scalable group key agreement protocol based on layer-cluster group model for mobile ad hoc networks was proposed. In this protocol, multi-linear map is employed on layer-cluster structure to establish and allocate group key. So that it can not only meet security demands of larger mobile ad hoc networks but also improve executing performance.