Robust Membership Management for Ad-hoc Groups

In ad-hoc networks, the network nodes or users often form peer groups. The members of a group may share an application, a physical location, or administrative tasks. Defining who is a member of the group is also the first step towards establishing a shared secret key for secure communications. Group membership management involves adding and removing nodes in the group, as well as a method for authenticating the group members. In this paper, we present a fully distributed, certificate-based system for group membership management. It is designed to suit highly dynamic ad-hoc networks where communications is sporadic and nodes often fail unexpectedly.