N-ary tree based key distribution in a network as a service provisioning model

Cloud networking is a new technology which integrates network provisioning with the existing cloud service provisioning models. This integration allows service providers to provision network resources together with network performance guarantees as a part of their service offering. However, the introduction of multiple providers and service levels introduces many security challenges. One such challenge is identity management, especially authentication of different entities. This paper presents an analysis of a management scheme deployed in a simulated cloud network test bed. Our results show that this scheme is faster than binary and erasure encoding schemes. The scheme uses an N-ary approach and thus allows the placement of n entities at each level, unlike the binary scheme which is restricted to two entities.