Greedy Receivers in IEEE 802.11 Hotspots

Abstract

As wireless hotspot business becomes a tremendous financial success, users of these networks have increasing motives to misbehave in order to obtain more bandwidth at the expense of other users. Such misbehaviors threaten the performance and availability of hotspot networks, and have recently attracted increasing research attention. However the existing work so far focuses on sender-side misbehavior. Motivated by the observation that many hotspot users receive more traffic than they send, we study greedy receivers in this paper. We identify a range of greedy receiver misbehaviors, and quantify their damage using both simulation and testbed experiments. Our results show that even though greedy receivers do not directly control data transmission, they can still result in very serious damage, including completely shutting off the competing traffic. To address the issues, we further develop techniques to detect and mitigate greedy receiver misbehavior, and demonstrate their effectiveness.