Detection and prevention of MAC layer misbehavior in ad hoc networks

Abstract

Selfish behavior at the MAC layer can have devastating side effects on the performance of wireless networks, similar to the effects of DoS attacks. In this paper we focus on the prevention and detection of the manipulation of the backoff mechanism by selfish nodes in 802.11. We first propose an algorithm to ensure honest backoffs when at least one, either the receiver or the sender is honest. Then we discuss detection algorithms to deal with the problem of colluding selfish nodes. Although we have focused on the MAC layer of 802.11, our approach is general and can serve as a guideline for the design of any probabilistic distributed MAC protocol.