Detecting Selfish Configurations in 802.11 WLANs

Abstract

Lately, there has been an increase in the number of IEEE 802.11 devices that provide users with the ability to modify the MAC parameters or do not conform to the standard specification. This increases the risk of having a WLAN with selfish stations that, through the CSMA/CA parameters, obtain a larger share of the resources at the expense of well-behaved users. In this letter we propose a mechanism to detect these selfish stations that, unlike previous approaches, is not based on heuristics nor makes any assumption about radio conditions.