Impact of Contention Window Cheating on Single-Hop IEEE 802.11e MANETs

This paper presents a work in progress which deals with the important and unresolved problem of node misbehavior. A realistic approach is used to determine the impact of contention window manipulation on IEEE 802.11e ad-hoc networks. It is explained why such networks are more prone to misbehavior. Novel results pertaining to the 802.11e standard are presented. Simulation analysis is done for several scenarios with a distinction made for uplink and downlink traffic. It is shown that a misbehaving node can jeopardize network performance, therefore, countermeasures to this problem need to be developed.