A Study on IEEE 802.11 MAC Layer Misbehavior under Different Back-off Algorithms

Security of any wireless network is an important issue. The IEEE 802.11 medium access control can be violated by several native or smart attacks that result to downgrade network performance. In recent years, there are several studies using analytical model to analyze MAC layer misbehavior issue to explore this problem but focused on binary exponential back-off only. Moreover, a practical condition such as freezing back-off issue is not included in the previous models. Hence, this paper presents a novel analytical model of the IEEE 802.11 MAC to thoroughly understand impacts of misbehaving node on network throughput and delay parameters. Especially, the model can express detailed back-off algorithms so that comforts to evaluate the network performance under some typical attacks by numerical simulation method.