MrFair: Misbehavior-resistant fair scheduling in wireless mesh networks

It is a critical issue to ensure that nodes and/or flows have fair access to the network bandwidth in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). However, current WMNs based on IEEE 802.11 exhibit severe unfairness. Several scheduling schemes have been proposed to ensure fairness in WMNs. Unfortunately, all of them implicitly trust nodes in the network, and thus are vulnerable to the misbehavior of nodes participating in scheduling. In this paper, we address the threats to fair scheduling in WMNs resulting from node misbehavior and present a generic verification framework to detect such misbehavior. Moreover, we develop two verification schemes based on this framework for distributed and centralized authentication environments, respectively. We validate our approach by extending an existing fair scheduling scheme and evaluating it through simulation. The results show that our approach improves misbehavior detection with light performance overhead.