Studying misbehavior in CSMA/CA Wireless LANs

ABSTRACT

Security is a fundamental aspect for achieving high availability and reliability in wireless networks. Wireless medium access control (MAC) protocols use distributed contention resolution mechanisms for sharing the wireless medium. Wireless nodes decide access to their channel independently and accessing the channel by a node has an influence on those of other nodes. In this environment, selfish nodes that do not obey the operation of the MAC protocol may obtain an unfair share of the channel bandwidth at the expense of well-behaved nodes.

Game theory is a useful and powerful tool to research this kind of systems. We study the effect of misbehavior in CSMA/CA wireless LANs and in particular in Idle Sense access method which has been designed to optimize the performance and fairness of the network using game theory. We show that Nash equilibrium point of our game is not an optimal point of the game. Then we find the Pareto-optimal point of our game using static game model from Nash bargaining framework. We design a prevention model to force nodes converge to the Pareto-optimal point and make the Pareto-optimal point as the Nash equilibrium point of our game. Finally, we devise a detection system to detect deviating cheaters from optimal point.

REFERENCES

• 1: Martin Heusse , Franck Rousseau , Romaric Guillier , Andrzej Duda, Idle sense: an optimal access method for high throughput and fairness in rate diverse wireless LANs, Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 22-26, 2005, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• 2: M. Cagalj, S. Ganeriwal, I. Aad and J. P. Hubaux; On selfish Behavior in CSMA/CA networks; in Proceedings of IEEE Infocom, 2005.
• 3: Lei Guang , Chadi Assi , Abderrahim Benslimane, Modeling and analysis of predictable random backoff in selfish environments, Proceedings of the 9th ACM international symposium on Modeling analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems, October 02-06, 2006, Terromolinos, Spain [doi>10.1145/1164717.1164733]
• 4: Y. Xiao, X. Shan and Y. Ren; Game Theory Models for IEEE 802.11 DCF in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks; in Proceedings of IEEE Radio Communications, 2005.
• 5: J. Konorski; CSMA/CA Performance Under Backoff Attacks: A Game-Theoretic Context; in Proceedings of MMB, 2004.
• 6: G. Bianchi; Peformance Analysis of the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination fucntion; in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 18(3):535--547, March 2000.
• 7: LAN/MAN Standards Committee, ANSI/IEEE Std 802.11:Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications, IEEE Computer Society, 2003.
• 8: Network Simulator (NS), http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.0 General
          Subjects: Security and protection (e.g., firewalls)

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.5 Local and Wide-Area Networks
          Subjects: Access schemes

General Terms:
Algorithms, Security, Theory

Keywords:
Wireless LAN, game theory, medium access control, selfish behavior