A General Robust Key Management Scheme for Wireless Multihop Communication Network

Wireless multihop communication network is an important part of modern communication network, because of its flexible forms of networking, not relying on any fixed infrastructure to achieve network connectivity and data transfer, but through the mobile nodes' collaboration and self-organization. The negative impact of network partitions on the availability of key management services in wireless multihop communication network will be alleviated by a robust key management scheme based on the traditional distributed certificate authority (DCA) proposed in this paper. Auxiliary shares are used to increase the redundancy of shares in the networks thereby ensuring robustness and security at the same time. Simulating results show that the average failure ratio for DCA requests is reduced by more than 5 %, and the successful rate of establishing secure link is greatly improved. Security analysis and simulations show that the approach ensures system robustness and thwarts common attacks. Copyright © 2013 IFSA.