Load Balancing Aware Multiparty Secure Group Communication for Online Services in Wireless Mesh Networks

The internet offers services for users which can be accessed in a collaborative shared manner. Users control these services, such as online gaming and social networking sites, with handheld devices. Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are an emerging technology that can provide these services in an efficient manner. Because services are used by many users simultaneously, security is a paramount concern. Although many security solutions exist, they are not sufficient. None have considered the concept of load balancing with secure communication for online services. In this paper, a load aware multiparty secure group communication for online services in WMNs is proposed. During the registration process of a new client in the network, the Load Balancing Index (LBI) is checked by the router before issuing a certificate/key. The certificate is issued only if the value of LBI is less than a predefined threshold. The authors evaluate the proposed solution against the existing schemes with respect to metrics like storage and computation overhead, packet delivery fraction (PDF), and throughput. The results show that the proposed scheme is better with respect to these metrics.