Impact of misbehaving users in the p-persistent IEEE 802.11 network under saturation condition

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the impact of misbehaving users in the p-persistent IEEE 802.11 network under saturation condition. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the performance degradation of the p-persistent IEEE 802.11 protocol when disturbed by a small group of misbehaving users who do not conform to the agreed rules. Through mathematical analysis as well as computer simulations, it is found that the overall system throughput degraded even with the existence of only a few misbehaving users. Intensive investigations show that the level of performance degradation depends on two salient factors, the transmission probability of misbehaving users and the number of misbehaving users.