Mitigation of selfish carrier-sense behavior in Wi-Fi networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method to detect and mitigate the selfish behavior in 802.11 Wi-Fi networks. The proposed approach promptly detects the presence of selfish misbehavior in a Wi-Fi network based on the distinct characteristics of selfish carrier sensing: the selfish node will (i) cause a severe asymmetry between uplink and downlink collision probabilities, and (ii) have shorter inter-packet backoff intervals than legitimate nodes. To properly mitigate the impact of selfish behavior on system performance, we present a simple 802.11-compliant mitigation mechanism to be used by the AP. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is evaluated via extensive simulation with ns- 2. Our evaluation results show that the proposed approach accurately detects the misbehavior and mitigates the selfish carrier sense behavior effectively. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015.