Scalable secure multicast using multi server approach for wireless environments

Multicasting is a scalable solution for group communication. In order to offer forward and backward secrecy for multicast applications, the data encryption key (DEK) has to be changed whenever a user joins or leaves the system. Such a change has to be made known to all the current users. The re-keying cost of such re-key messaging can be high when the user pool is large. In this paper we propose a multi server approach for wireless environments to minimize the re-keying cost. The proposed system utilizes the dynamic split and merge with low overhead where a physical server adaptively splits and merges its traffic into multiple groups each served by a dedicated server. We compare the performance of this proposed approach with that of the single server case. Our results show that multi server architecture scales well as compared with the single server approaches.