An Efficient Group Key Management Scheme: Link Tree Protocol

Many group key management schemes such as those proposed by Wallner et al, Wong et al are based on a multilevel, logical hierarchy (or tree) of keyencrypting keys. But LKH is based on the hypothesis that the tree is maintained in a balanced manner. This paper proposes a multi-link tree protocol based on LKH. LTP keeps the structure balanced and has a better performance. We analyze multi-LTP and multi- LKH’s performance in detail. We prove that 3-degree LTP is the best structure among all the LTP structures, which is also better than LKH.