A Distributed Mechanism for Handling of Adaptive/Intelligent Selfish Misbehaviour at MAC Layer in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Medium access control (MAC) protocols such as IEEE 802.11 are used in wireless networks for sharing of the wireless medium. The random nature of the protocol operation together with the inherent difficulty of monitoring in the open poses significant challenges. All nodes are expected to comply with the protocol rules. But, some nodes in order to gain greater benefits misbehave by not complying with the rules. One such selfish misbehavior is waiting for smaller back-off intervals when compared to the other nodes in the same subnet. Such selfish misbehavior is being tackled in this paper. A diagnosis scheme and a penalty scheme are being proposed for overcoming such selfish-misbehavior at MAC layer of mobile ad hoc networks which could be extended to other types of networks also.