Analysis and simulation of the updating cost of group key management scheme in ad hoc network

Tree-based and star-based key management schemes have being widely used in ad hoc network. In this paper, we use the Discrete-Time Markov Chain (DTMC) to simulate the dynamic environment when group members join and leave. And we also analyze the updating cost of the tree-based and star-based structure. The analysis results show that the probability and velocity of members leaving dominate the relative performance between the two schemes. Therefore, we propose to use an adaptive key management scheme according to star-based scheme and canonical-tree-based scheme.