Characterizing the greedy behavior in wireless ad hoc networks

While the problem of greedy behavior at the MAC layer has been widely explored in the context of wireless local area networks (WLAN), its study for multi-hop wireless networks still almost an unexplored and unexplained problem. Indeed, in a wireless local area network, an access point mostly forwards packets sent by wireless nodes over the wired link. In this case, a greedy node can easily get more bandwidth share and starve all other associated contending nodes by manipulating intelligently MAC layer parameters. However, in wireless ad hoc environment, all packets are transmitted in a multi-hop fashion over wireless links. In this case, an attempting greedy node, if it behaves similarly as in a WLAN, trying to starve all its neighbors, then its next hop forwarder will be also prevented from forwarding its own traffic, which leads obviously to an end to end throughput collapse. In this paper, we show that in order to have a more beneficial greedy behavior in wireless ad hoc network, a node must adopt a different approach than in WLAN to achieve a better performance of its own flows. Then, we present a new strategy to launch such a greedy attack in a proactive routing based wireless ad hoc network. A detailed description of the proposed strategy is provided along with its validation through extensive simulations. The obtained results show that a greedy node, applying the defined strategy, can gain more bandwidth than its neighbors and keep the end-to-end throughput of its own flows highly reasonable. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.