Assessing the cooperativeness of users in Wi-Fi networks

Wi-Fi networks are based on the cooperation of users in sharing a common resource — the radio channel. This is a security risk because users may behave selfishly to increase their own throughput but at the same time decrease the overall network performance. Many scientific analyses have focused on this problem, but none have taken into account real user behavior. We present the initial results of a work-in-progress in which we studied a group of users in terms of their online behavior as well as their psychological characteristics. We have found that users behave selfishly in a wireless setting, regardless of their cooperative nature. We provide lessons learned as well as pose open questions for further research in this field.