AN ADAPTIVE SCHEME TO MANAGE MOBILITY FOR SECURE MULTICASTING IN WIRELESS LOCAL AREA NETWORKS
S. Cherukuri · 2004
Multicasting in wireless networks such as wireless local area networks (LANs) is a very significant communication paradigm. Wireless networks are characterized by stringent constraints due to mobility of hosts, scarcity of energy, and wireless bandwidth. In such situations, multicasting o#ers solutions which are e#cient. Security is very important for multicast services. As in any other communication paradigm, the data in multicast communication must be secure. Security features like secrecy, authenticity, and freshness can be achieved by means of cryptographic techniques. Access control to multicast services is very important since unauthorized access poses a huge problem in wireless networks. Access control can be handled in an approach di#erent from cryptographic techniques. In this approach, the location of the requestor is used as the input factor to determine whether access is to be granted or not. Location-based Access Control (LBAC) is more scalable and superior in terms of user privacy. But providing LBAC in mobile wireless networks with a high degree of mobility is non-trivial. In this thesis, three schemes for secure multicasting incorporating Location-based Access Control are presented. The three schemes vary according to whether the base station shares the same session key (SSK) with all the members of its cell or has a di#erent session key (DSK) for each one of the members, or has a combination (Hybrid) of the two schemes for e#cient key management. Mathematical analysis and simulations to show that the hybrid adaptive scheme performs better than the other two schemes at high mobilities are presented.