Thwarting Selfish Behavior in 802.11 WLANs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed algorithm to prevent selfish configuration of MAC parameters in 802.11e WLANs, ensuring fair throughput and stability through reactive strategies and game theoretic analysis.

Contribution

It proposes a novel reactive algorithm that discourages selfish behavior in WLANs and demonstrates its effectiveness through analysis, simulation, and prototype implementation.

Findings

Guarantees global stability in WLANs

Optimizes throughput performance

Effectively discourages selfish station behavior

Abstract

The 802.11e standard enables user configuration of several MAC parameters, making WLANs vulnerable to users that selfishly configure these parameters to gain throughput. In this paper we propose a novel distributed algorithm to thwart such selfish behavior. The key idea of the algorithm is for honest stations to react, upon detecting a selfish station, by using a more aggressive configuration that penalizes this station. We show that the proposed algorithm guarantees global stability while providing good response times. By conducting a game theoretic analysis of the algorithm based on repeated games, we also show its effectiveness against selfish stations. Simulation results confirm that the proposed algorithm optimizes throughput performance while discouraging selfish behavior. We also present an experimental prototype of the proposed algorithm demonstrating that it can be implemented on commodity hardware.