SMP: Scalable multicast protocol for granting authority in heterogeneous networks

The fundamental function of the network protocol is to provide confidential communications or services for authorized participants over an insecure network. The proliferation of the Internet and mobile computing technologies, however, has led to emerging applications such as message services, pay-per-view, teleconference, and collaboration tasks. Especially, users now can surf over the Internet or get online for communications via wired, wireless, 3G, or LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks. Traditional peer-to-peer transmission protocol will no longer suffice for these types of applications. Consequently, point-to-group and group-to-group transmission have become important areas of focus. The main challenge in designing a secure multicast mechanism results from large groups and frequent key updates caused by members joining and leaving. To mitigate the encumbrance of group high-mobility in heterogeneous networks, we propose a subgroup-based multicast protocol adopting Lagrange Interpolating Polynomial technique. Simulation results show that the scalable multicast protocol (SMP) can not only preserve the forward and backward secrecy of group communications but also perform better than related works on system communication cost and storage consumption.