Key Agreement for Heterogeneous Mobile Ad-Hoc Groups

In this paper we propose an efficient key agreement protocol suite for heterogeneous mobile ad-hoc groups, whose members use mobile devices with different performance limitations, e.g., laptops, PDAs, and mobile phones. Absence of a trusted central authority in ad-hoc groups requires contributory computation of the group key by interacting members. We introduce a performance ratio parameter to quantify the performance of a mobile device. Our protocols are based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) to achieve better computation efficiency and are proven secure