Security Challenges in Multicast Communication for Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Multicasting is an important business in the field of the wireless local area network (WLAN). The access point (AP) usually has to seed the same message to each station (STA) of a specific group, and the multicasting is one of the most efficient communication ways. To assure the validity of the entity and the privacy of the message, we should first solve the problem of the multicast key secure distribution. In WLAN security standards, IEEE802.11i and Chinese WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI), multicast key announcement protocols are inefficient. In this paper, a new multicast key distribution protocol is proposed, and it can be used to substitute the multicast key management protocol in IEEE802.11i or WAPI. Analyses show that the proposed protocol can achieve all functional requirements of WLAN, and is more efficient than that in IEEE802.11i or WAPI.

The main objective of coding theory is to find codes with efficient encoding and decoding techniques and the greatest possible value of distance for a given code length, code size, and code alphabet cardinality. Various distances like Hamming distances, symbol-pair distances, etc., have been established and investigated in coding theory to analyse a code’s error-detecting and error-correcting capabilities with respect to various communication channels. A maximum distance separable code (MDS code) is a code that meets the Singleton bound. The MDS codes have the greatest error correcting capability. When the length and size of the codes are fixed, an MDS code has the largest distance. As a result, nowadays, researching and discovering MDS codes with respect to various distances is a hot topic in coding theory. In the theory of error-correcting codes, constacyclic codes over finite fields play a crucial role. Constacyclic codes, moreover, have many real-world applications. Shift registers can effectively encode and decode these codes because they have rich algebraic structures. They also offer excellent error-correction capabilities. All of this clarifies their chosen engineering role. In this monograph, we determine the multi-symbol distances of various classes of repeated-root constacyclic codes over some classes of finite commutative chain rings and investigate various classes of non-trivial MDS codes using these multi-symbol distance distributions.

The efficient and high throughput multicast communication in interconnection networks is known as a fundamental but hard problem. In the literature, most of the related works handle multicast communication within limited operating conditions and low throughput. Recently, a new multicast scheme, known as qualified groups QG, was proposed in [2] and has shown promising performance characteristics. However, this scheme has been examined only, so far, under deterministic routing and symmetric networks. In order to examine the QG in more realistic and different scenarios, this paper makes two major contributions. Firstly, the QG is generalised here to handling multicast communication in symmetric, asymmetric and different network sizes. Secondly, unlike most existing multicast algorithms the present study proposes a new adaptive multicast algorithm that maintains good performance levels for various system sizes. Our experiments show that the QG exhibits significant improvement in both throughput and multicast latency.

An attempt is made to realize highly reliable multicast communications without modifying the TCP protocol, which is now the most widely used in the Internet, and TCP multicast using a GRA (generic router assist) router is proposed. The characteristics of this multicast communications are evaluated, and it is shown that the overall throughput of multicast communications is governed by the bottleneck link in the transmission band. An attempt is made to improve the performance of multicast communications with a bottleneck link, and an environment‐adaptive multicast communication scheme is proposed, in which the multicast tree is partitioned at the bottleneck link, and TCP multicasting is performed for each subtree. Performance evaluation by simulation shows that the proposed method alleviates the effect of the bottleneck link on the overall multicast and that the performance of the multicast as a whole can be improved. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 87(3): 28–38, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecja.10161

The architecture of overlay networks should support high-performance and high-scalability at low costs. This becomes more crucial when communication, storage costs as well as service latencies grow with the exploding amounts of data exchanged and with the size and span of the overlay network. For that end, multicast methodologies can be used to deliver content from regional servers to end users, as well as for the timely and economical synchronization of content among the distributed servers. Another important architectural problem is the efficient allocation of objects to servers to minimize storage, delivery and update costs. In this work, we suggest a multicast based architecture and address the optimal allocation and replication of dynamic objects that are both consumed and updated. Our model network includes consumers which are served using multicast or unicast transmissions and media sources (that may be also consumers) which update the objects using multicast communication. General costs are associated with distribution (download) and update traffic as well as the storage of objects in the servers. Optimal object allocation algorithms for tree networks are presented with complexities of O(N) and O(N 2) in case of multicast and unicast distribution respectively. To our knowledge, the model of multicast distribution combined with multicast updates has not been analytically dealt before, despite its popularity in the industry.

Mobile multicast can provide various services with the development of wireless and mobile technologies. While the current mobile multicast schemes mostly provide the mobile multicast services for signal interface based mobile nodes which has the limited service capacity and may result in service disruption and packet loss. Recently, more mobile devices begin to equip multiple network interfaces to attach to multiple networks at the same time (called multi-homing mobile node). To support the mobile multicast services for multi-homing mobile node attached to the multiple heterogeneous networks, we propose a multiple network interfaces based mobile multicast scheme called the multi-homing mobile multicast (MMoM) scheme in this paper. The MMoM scheme consists of the multiple interfaces management, multicast flow distribution policy and mobile multicast handover mechanisms, and it can provide seamless mobile multicast services. To evaluate the performance of MMoM scheme, we set up a test-bed and implement MMoM in our test-bed. The experimental results show that the MMoM scheme improves the performance of multicast handover and reduces the service disruption time compared with the single network interface based mobile multicast schemes.

Group-oriented applications require multicast communication for distributing information among the group members efficiently. The deployment of such kind of applications in strategic and military grade organizations needs the group-oriented mechanism. The concerns involved in multicast communication are forward and backward security, source/recipient identification and authentication, key revocation and secure rekeying. This paper proposes a source specific centralized multicast scheme based on IPSec infrastructure by addressing these security challenges. The management, in proposed multicast scheme, has been carried out using the Group Internet Key Exchange (G-IKE v2) version 2 protocol.

In MANETs, establishing a secure and trustworthy route between the source and the destination nodes are always difficult due to the lack of centralised infrastructure and high dependency on intermediate nodes for routing the packets during a multicast communication. Moreover, reliable dissemination of data necessitates a trustworthy route that is free from root node attack, which interrupts the degree of coordination in group communication. Hence, a need arises for devising a mechanism that mitigates root node attack. In this paper, we propose a Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient-based reputation mechanism (CARCRM) for mitigating root node attack in an ad hoc environment. In this mitigation mechanism, the detection of malicious nodes is based on a factor called Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient (CARC), which aids in estimating the reputation level of each and every mobile node participating in the group for effectively and efficiently mitigating root node attack. The performance analysis of CARCRM is carried out based on ns-2 simulator by considering the performance metrics like packet delivery ratio, throughput, control overhead and total overhead. Simulation results obtained portrays that the proposed CARCRM outperforms the existing mechanisms proposed for mitigating root node attack.

Multicast is an efficient transport mechanism for group-based community communications and mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) is recently regarded as a promising solution for supporting ubiquitous computing as an underlying network technology. However, it is challenging to deploy the multicast mechanism used in a wired network directly into MANET owing to scarce resources in wireless networks and unpredictable changes in network topology. Several multicast mechanisms have been proposed in the literature to overcome these limitations. In MANET, especially, overlay multicasting schemes present several advantages over network-based multicasting schemes. However we have observed a common limitation of previously proposed overlay multicasting schemes. They introduce redundant data transmissions that waste network bandwidth and the battery of relay nodes. The observation motivated us to propose an efficient way to create and maintain a “semi-overlay structure” that utilizes a few nonmember nodes selected as branch nodes. The proposed scheme, called “SOMRP (Semi-overlay multicast routing protocol),” has been evaluated by using extensive network simulation in two different scenarios, comparing the performance of SOMRP with two previously proposed schemes. Simulation results show that SOMRP outperforms the two schemes in terms of the packet delivery ratio, transmission cost and end-to-end delay.

Without doubt, multicast communication as a means for one-to-many or many-to-many delivery of data has become a hot topic in multimedia environments. A lot of people are interested in multicast: the research community, standards groups and Internet Service Providers (ISP) among them. Although IP multicast is a very good solution for Internetworking multimedia in many-to-many communications, there are still issues that have not been completely solved. Protocols are still evolving and new protocols are constantly coming up to solve these issues because that is the only way for making multicast become a true Internet service. The main goal of this chapter is to describe the evolution of IP multicast from the obsolete MBone (Multicast Backbone) and intra-domain multicast routing to the actual inter-domain multicast routing scheme. We will pay special attention to the challenges and problems that need to be solved, the problems that have been solved and the way they were solved. We will make a complete picture of the state of the art explaining the idea behind each protocol and how all those protocols work together.

Multicast communication in mobile adhoc networks is challenging due to its inherent characteristics of infrastructure-less architecture with lack of central authority, limited resources such as bandwidth, time, energy and power. Many emerging commercial and military applications require secure multicast communication in adhoc environments. Moreover, mobile nodes are often power constrained so that energy conservation is also an important issue on multicast key distribution. This paper evaluates the energy conservation of a new approach of multicast key distribution called cluster based multicast tree algorithm with multicast destination sequenced distance vector routing protocol to provide reliable and efficient energy conservation of multicast key distribution. Simulation results in NS2 accurately predict the performance of proposed scheme in terms of energy consumption and end to end delay rate under varying network conditions.KeywordsMobile Adhoc NetworksMulticastKey DistributionEnergy conservation

AS businesses become more dependent on IP networks, lots of real-time services are adopted and high availability in networks has become increasingly critical. With the development of carrier grade ethernet, the requirements of high speed metro ethernet device are more urgently. In order to reach the capacity of hundreds of Gbps or Tbps, most of core ethernet switches almost adopted distributed control architecture and large capacity forwarding fabric. When distributed switch works, they always have one CE and many FE. There for, it shows the feature of multicast with one sender and many receivers. It is deserved research for us how to apply reliable multicast to distributed switch inner communication system. In this paper, we present the general architecture of a distributed ethernet switch, focusing on analysis the model of internal communication subsystem. According to its character, a novel reliable multicast communication mechanism based on FEC recovery algorithm has been applied and evaluated in experiment.

The deployment of real-time and multimedia applications over Wireless LAN has gained a growing interest in this last decade. These applications, e.g. video streaming, require tight guarantee on Quality of Service (QoS). Also, they use multicast communication in order to reduce the bandwidth consumption. However, in WLAN, multicast packets are sent with the basic rate (lowest rate); which results in capacity wasting because of longer channel occupancy. Moreover the lack of feedback mechanism makes it difficult to deal with reliability or service quality. In this paper, we propose to rely on the WLAN multi-rate capability, in order to transmit multicast packets with higher and dynamic rate than the basic rate. Unlike other existing protocols that use a static-threshold to decide when to change transmission rate, we propose a novel dynamic rate-adaptation mechanism based on Quality of Experience (QoE), namely Q-DRAM. According to the clients' feedback on QoE, we adapt the multicast rate: (i) when users had bad QoE we reduce the multicast transmission rate; (ii) when users had good QoE, we increase the multicast transmission rate. Simulation results show that Q-DRAM increases the wireless channel utilization and maximizes users' QoE, compared to existing solutions as well as to the IEEE 802.11 standard.

International audience

We present the on-demand link vector (OLIVE) protocol, a routing protocol for ad hoc networks based on link-state information that is free of routing loops and supports destination-based packet forwarding. Routers exchange routing information reactively for each destination in the form of complete paths, and each node creates a labeled source graph based on the paths advertised by its neighbors. A node originates a broadcast route request (RREQ) to obtain a route for a destination for which a complete path does not exist in its source graph. When the original path breaks, a node can select an alternative path based on information reported by neighbors, and a node can send a unicast RREQ to verify that the route is still active. A node that cannot find any alternate path to a destination sends route errors reliably to those neighbors that were using it as next hop to the destination. Using simulation experiments in ns2, OLIVE is shown to outperform dynamic source routing, ad hoc on-demand distance vector, optimized link-state routing protocol, and topology broadcast based on reverse-path forwarding, in terms of control overhead, throughput, and average network delay, while maintaining loop-free routing with no need for source routes.