Hexagonal Clustered Trust Based Distributed Group Key Agreement Scheme in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Secure and efficient group communication among mobile nodes is one of the significant aspects in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The group key management (GKM) is a well established cryptographic technique to authorise and to maintain group key in a multicast communication, through secured channels. In a secure group communication, a one-time session key is required to be shared between the participants by using distributed group key agreement (GKA) schemes. Due to the resource constraints of ad hoc networks, the security protocols should be communication efficient with less overhead as possible. The GKM solutions from various researches lacks in considering the mobility features of ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose a hexagonal clustered one round distributed group key agreement scheme with trust (HT-DGKA) in a public key infrastructure based MANET environment. The proposed HT-DGKA scheme guarantees an access control with key authentication and secrecy. The performance of HT-DGKA is evaluated by simulation analysis in terms of key agreement time and overhead for different number of nodes. Simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme guarantees better performance to secure mobile ad hoc network. It is demonstrated that the proposed scheme possesses a maximum of 2250 ms of key agreement time for the higher node velocity of 25 m/s and lower key agreement overhead. Also, the HT-DGKA scheme outperforms the existing schemes in terms of successful message rate, packet delivery ratio, level of security, computation complexity, number of round, number of exponentiations and number of message sent and received that contribute to the network performance.