The Research Of Key Management For Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc networks (with no infrastructure) have many applications in any situation where the network is needed to be self-organized rapidly. Its security attracts more and more attentions. In this paper, key distributing is mainly discussed. Researchers have proposed the communication cost can be reduced when the key management scheme is designed according to the network topology. We developed many kinds of key management schemes which are complete centralized, complete distributed, and distributed-centralized. This paper compared the advantages and disadvantages of these key management schemes and showed the distributed-centralized is optimized. In this paper, we proposed the re-keying messages can be reduced when the leaf nodes are averagely located under each back-bone node. The re-keying messages will also be reduced while the number of gateway nodes decrease. Based on this argumentation, we improved the arithmetic which is used to form the virtual backbone networks.