Penalization of Selfish and Misbehaving Nodes at MAC Layer in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Vol.2 No.3

Year: 2008

Issue: January-March

Title: Penalization of Selfish and Misbehaving Nodes at MAC Layer in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks   

Author Name: Gunasekarn R, Rhymend Utthariaraj V, Sudharsan R, Sujitha Priyadharsini S, Yamini U   

Synopsis:     

In wireless networks all nodes contending to access the medium are supposed to follow the rules of the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. Wireless Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols such as IEEE 802.11 use a distributed contention resolution mechanism for sharing the wireless channel. The hosts competing for access to the channel are required to wait for a “back off” interval, randomly selected from a specified range, before initiating a transmission. Selfish nodes (or misbehaving nodes) tempt to manipulate their back off parameters to gain more access to the channel, and hence have higher performance than their fair share.  Such selfish behavior in the MAC layer can have devastating side effects on the performance of Wireless Networks. Here, the problem of detection of node misbehavior in the MAC layer, with the objective to provide an optimum performance is being considered. This framework captures the presence of uncertainty of attacks and concentrates on the attacks that are most significant in terms of incurred performance losses. It also refers to the case of an intelligent attacker that can adapt its policy to avoid being detected.