A Simulation Research Of Multi-Layered Group Key Management Scheme In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

As a new kind of wireless communication, mobile ad-hoc networks have improved quickly since 1990s. This kind of networks has received a great deal of attention in academia, industry and military affairs because it provides anytime-anywhere networking services. As wireless networks are widely and deeply deployed in the future, secure wireless environment will be mandatory and the group key management scheme of it is of great importance. We usually use encryption to protect the inside networks from the outside ones. Although encryption can be used to protect messages exchanged among group members, distributing the cryptographic keys becomes an issue. Researchers have proposed several different approaches to the group key management. These approaches can be divided into three main classes: centralized group key management protocols, decentralized architectures and distributed key management protocols. The group key management scheme will guarantee the data's security, integrality, and resistance. In this paper, a multi-layered key management scheme is put forward. We use two improved algorithm of Wu and Li and CEDAR to optimize the whole networks' structure into multi-layers (two or three layers) and propose a group key management scheme using both centralized (OFT) and distributed (TGDH) group key management.Then we do our simulation works upon the optimized networks' structure with the compounded group key management. After analyzing the simulation data files, we find that the proposed approach outperforms that of the approach without topology optimizing or that using only one type of group key management. We can draw a conclusion that using the approach of the group key management scheme which we put forward and the topology optimizing algorithm which we improved can lead to a better solution metnod of the communication behavior of mobile ad-hoc networks than using the traditional theory.