Secure and Efficient Multicast Rekeying Approach for Non-Transparent Relay-Based IEEE 802.16 Networks

Many emerging applications that depend on secure group communications demand the privacy of participants and access control at the multicast server. The multicast and broadcast services in IEEE 802.16 are efficient and power saving mechanisms, which no doubt also provide subscribers with strong and powerful security protection from the theft of service by encrypting broadcast connections between subscriber station (SS), relay station (RS), non-transparent relay station (NRS) and Multihop relay base station (MR-BS). However, the existing multicast and broadcast rekeying algorithm (MBRA) not only facing forward secrecy, backward secrecy and scalability problems for IEEE 802.16e but also for multi- hop relay based networks both in centralized as well as distributed zone. Although many researches try to give solutions for the above problems, all of them focus mainly on IEEE 802.16e networks and none of paper is published on distributed relay-based Wimax networks. This paper illustrates the main security problem of MBRA in general which is scalability, backward and forward secrecy and proposes a new Secure and efficient distributed Relay- based Rekeying Algorithm (SEDRRA) scheme for non- transparent Multihop IEEE 802.16 networks. The proposed scheme uses non-transparent decode and forward relays. Both analysis and performance evaluation show that our scheme can significantly reduce the complexity and solve all of the above problems in an efficient way.