Analysis of Effect of User Misbehaviours on the Reservation-Based MAC Protocols in Wireless Communication Networks

SUMMARY In a shared medium communication system, mobile users contend for channel access according to a given set of rules to avoid collisions and achieve efficient use of the medium. If one or more users do not comply with the agree rules either due to selfish or malicious behaviours, they will cause some impacts on the system performance, especially to the well-behaved users. In this paper, we consider the problem of user misbehaviours on the performance of a wireless infrastructure-based network using reservation-based MAC protocols. Key misbehaving strategies possible in such a network are identified and explained. To quantify the impact of these misbehaviours upon the network performance, three different misbehaving scenarios are developed to allow a systematic investigation of each misbehaving strategy. For each scenario, we have derived mathematical formulations for evaluating and analyzing the key performance metrics, i.e., probabilities of success of well-behaved and misbehaved users and the fairness index. Numerical results show that the presence of misbehaviours can cause different levels of damage depending on the misbehavior strategy used. The combined multi-token and increasing permission probability strategies where the misbehaved user selfishly accesses the channel more times and with higher probabilities than allowed is shown to cause the most severe impairment of performance and fairness.