Overlay Ring Based Secure Group Communication Scheme for Mobile Agents

Among the various inter-agent communication models proposed for multi-agent systems so far, several group communication schemes have been issued to guarantee the transparent communication among the agents. However, in mobile agent environments where each agent has mobility in the network, those schemes are not sufficient to fully handle the topological change caused by the migration of mobile agents. Also, these group communication schemes should be secure in order for them to be practical. In this paper, we propose a secure group communication scheme which applies the hierarchical overlay ring structure of mobile agents. The proposed scheme uses the ring channel in order to cope adaptively with the change of ring topology. The ring channel has the fundamental information to construct the ring and is managed by only the mobile agent platforms. Therefore, each mobile agent does not need to directly handle the ring channel and can perform group communication regardless of the changing ring topology.