A New Mechanism to Detect Selfish Behavior in IEEE 802.11 Ad Hoc Networks

Selfish behavior at the MAC (medium access control) layer can have devastating side effects on the performance of wireless ad hoc networks. In this work, we consider the problem of detecting selfish behavior at the MAC layer in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks when a selfish node can manipulate the backoff operation. We propose a simple and robust mechanism based on CUSUM (cumulative sum) test by tracing the statistics characteristic in real time to detect the selfish behavior. This method can be used with any random access MAC protocols and it does not require any modification on the existing protocols. The efficacy of this detection mechanism has been validated by a Qualnet simulator. Our simulation results show that the detection mechanism has short detection time and high detection accuracy.