Detection and prevention of selfish and misbehaving nodes at MAC layer in mobile ad hoc networks

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. 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.