DKMS: distributed hierarchical access control for multimedia networks

Hierarchical access control for group communication provides access control which can assure that group members can subscribe different data streams or possibly multiples of them in a multimedia network. In this paper, to efficiently and effectively achieve this goal, we propose a Distributed Key Management Scheme (DKMS) whereby each Service Group (SG) maintains a SG server and give detailed analysis. In the proposed scheme, the server for a SG is utilised to manage the key tree and provide the related session keys for all the users in this SG. Detailed analysis is provided and we show that the communication overhead can be greatly reduced by O(n₀log_dn₀), where n₀ is the number of users in a SG, compared with employing an integrated key graph to the hierarchical access control problem. At the same time, the storage overhead for all users can be reduced by O(N), where N is the total number of users.