Detection and handling of MAC layer misbehavior in wireless networks

Abstract

Selfish hosts in wireless networks that fail to adhere to the MAC protocol may obtain an unfair share of the channel bandwidth. We present modifications to the IEEE 802.11 backoff mechanism to simplify detection of such selfish hosts. We also present a correction scheme for penalizing greedy misbehavior which attempts to restrict the misbehaving nodes to a fair share of the channel bandwidth. Simulation results indicate that our detection and correction schemes are fairly successful in handling MAC layer misbehavior.