Public key management scheme with certificate management node for wireless ad hoc networks

An authentication technique is an important issue for a wireless ad hoc network that is composed with unknown nodes. The self-organized public key management scheme that each node creates and manages certificates by itself has been proposed for the network that does not connect to the Internet with a certificate authority. However, it needs large time and loads heavy traffic to collect all certificates in the network. In this paper, we propose public key management scheme with repository management node that collects certificates of each node in its power range. This proposed scheme consists of selecting certificate management node (CMN) and clustering techniques. It can reduce the time to collect certificates from the CMN when normal nodes access to the CMN. Furthermore, our proposed scheme can reduce memory and traffic loads because normal nodes neither have all certificates nor exchange repositories each other. By a computer simulation, we evaluate average traffic and an amount of memory consumption and show that the proposed scheme can reduce the both of them than conventional schemes.