Group Authentication Protocol for Mobile Networks

The rapid progress and the wide-spread use of the Internet and wireless communications in our professional endeavors and personal lives are making indispensable the need for ubiquitous authenticated connectivity for both mobile individuals and groups. In this paper, we present mGAP, a new protocol for mobile group authentication in wireless networks. mGAP predicts nodes' behavior and manages the authentication of mobile groups and individual nodes during roaming across administrative domains. Unlike most existing solutions, our design distributes the load between the mobile access points and the mobile nodes taking into account the mobile nodes' limited resources. Analysis of mGAP's security and performance is included in the paper.