Secure and efficient medium access in wireless networks

One of the fundamental tasks of the MAC layer in wireless networks is coordinating channel access securely and efficiently. However, the contention-based medium access scheme used in IEEE 802.11 networks has been found to be suboptimal, especially for a large number of users. Moreover, it is vulnerable to misbehavior resulting in an unfair share of the wireless channel. To tackle these two problems, we propose a distributed scheduling-based medium access scheme. In addition to its high efficiency, this scheme also provides security by design and ensures a fair distribution of wireless resources.