Summary Group key management (GKM) is an important research topic in mobile multicast communication nowadays. With the development of multiple services based on groups, it may be a very common phenomenon that multiple multicast groups coexist under a single network, and mobile subscribers can subscribe a variety of these services. Nevertheless, the current GKM schemes are focused on the communication in only a single group, which do not fit for multiple multicast group scenarios because of inefficient use of keys. In this paper, we propose a novel GKM scheme for multiple multicast groups in the Internet of People, called the area based multiple GKM (AMGKM) scheme. AMGKM can be implemented in wireless mobile network environments such as VANETs, and supports users to move across the wireless networks in the Internet of People while users subscribing to multiple multicast services with minimized communication overheads. AMGKM can also effectively mitigate the investment pressure of signaling load, and satisfy both the forward and the backward security and support membership changes. Our proposed method exploits the master key encryption (MKE) algorithm for efficiently reducing the rekeying overheads while providing intense security. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.