QoS provision in an ad hoc IEEE 802.11 WLAN: A Bayesian War of attrition model

An ad hoc IEEE 802.11 WLAN with anonymous and selfish stations is a most challenging setting for QoS provision. We argue that stations should complete QoS sessions sequentially, exhausting all the channel bandwidth to discourage interfering sessions. Session-level channel contention, called session bidding, is described and the resulting performance is studied in a game-theoretic framework, using an N-player Bayesian war of attrition game model. Station spoofing and Sybil attack is shown to be either unprofitable or preventable with relatively simple measures.