ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper presents the design for secure IP multicasting in an iNet environment using public key cryptography. Morgan State University has been conducting research to improve the telemetry network by improving network performance, implementing IP (Internet Protocol) multicasting and providing a stronger security system for the iNet environment. The present study describes how IP multicasting could be implemented to provide more secure communication in the iNet environment by reducing traffic and optimizing network performance. The multicast of data is closely tied to the key management center for secure applications. This paper develops a means of delivering keys between two or more parties showing a relationship between the multicast network and the Key Management Center (KMC). The KMC is an element of the system which distributes and manages session keys among multicast members. A public key encryption method is used to address the distribution of session keys in the multicast network. The paper will present a system level design of multicast and key management with dual encryption of session keys for the iNet system.

IP multicasting is a method for transmitting the same information to multiple receivers over IP networks. Reliability issue of multicasting contains the challenges for detection and recovery of packet losses and ordered delivery of the entire data. In this work, existing reliable multicast protocols are classified into three main groups, namely tree based, NACK-only and router assisted, and a representative protocol for each group is selected to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of the corresponding approaches. The selected protocols are SRM, PGM and RMTP. Performance characteristics of these protocols are empirically evaluated by using simulation results. Network Simulator-2 (ns2), a discrete event simulator is used for the implementation and simulation of the selected protocols. The contributions of the thesis are twofold, i.e. the extension of the ns library with an open source implementation of RMTP which did not exist earlier and the evaluation of the selected protocols by investigating performance metrics like distribution delay and recovery latency with respect to varying multicast group size, network diameter, link loss rate, etc.