Saturation Throughput Analysis of Steganography in the IEEE 802.11p Protocol in the Presence of Non-Ideal Transmission Channel

Vehicular network is a communication technology designed to provide comfort and improve life safety and driving efficiency on the road. In vehicular network, trustworthy communication is very important as fake applications may lead to disastrous road accidents. Several information hiding methods are used to enable vehicles to communicate secretly or to covertly report a misbehaving vehicle. The work in this paper focuses on a performance analysis based on 2-D Markov chain model for the system throughput of steganographic scheme in relation to the IEEE 802.11p standard. This model studies wireless padding (WiPad) that is used to hide data into the padding of packets at the physical layer of wireless local area networks (WLANs). The analytical study is under non-saturated conditions with non-ideal transmission channel. The study also considers the rate of packet arrival with the first order of buffer memory, back-off timer freezing, back-off phases, and short retry limit to satisfy the IEEE 802.11p specifications. It emphasizes that taking these factors into account are significant in modelling the system throughput of the steganographic channel. These factors typically provide a precise channel access estimation, yield more accurate findings of system throughput, use the channel efficiently, prevent overestimation of saturation throughput, and ensure that no packet is served indefinitely. The model is validated by comparing the numerical and simulation results under different network parameters. Analytical and simulation results stated that the values of the system throughput of the steganographic channel based on data and control frames are low as the vehicles number n, traffic arrival rate λ, packet size, and the value of Bit Error Rate (BER) increase.