MSDN-GKM: Software Defined Networks Based Solution for Multicast Transmission with Group Key Management

Multicast communication is an important requirement to support many types of applications, such as, IPTV, videoconferencing, group games. Recently this multicast applications type emerges fast, in one side more application provider proposed many applications, in other side Internet research community has proposed many different multicast routing protocols to support efficient multicast application. Therefore, the necessity of secure mechanism to provide the confidentiality and privacy of communications are more and more insistent. In current standardized IP multicast architecture, any host can join a multicast group, as source or receiver, without authentication, because no host identification information is maintained by routers, this situation leads clearly to many security risks issues. For security enhancement in multicast communication, in this paper an SDN based multicast solution with Group Key Management (GKM) approach was introduced. Our proposal solution, MSDN-GKM, includes many SDN modules to support multicast functions, group key generation, Group key exchange, storage, use, and keys replacement if any multicast group membership occurs. To prove the efficiency of our proposal solution a prototype is implemented in our SDN platform. The test-bed result proves that our proposal solution is greater to the traditional IP multicast proposed in the literature, which is reflected in two aspects: firstly, multicast metrics performance in terms of end-to-end delay, tree construction delay and delay variation. Secondly, the multicast group key management performance in terms of storage overhead and time processing. © 2021, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.