Near-Optimal Deviation-Proof Medium Access Control Designs in Wireless Networks

Distributed medium access control (MAC) protocols are essential for the proliferation of low-cost, decentralized wireless local area networks (WLANs). Most MAC protocols are designed with the presumption that nodes comply with prescribed rules. However, selfish nodes have natural motives to manipulate protocols in order to improve their own performance. This often degrades the performance of other nodes as well as that of the overall system. In this paper, we propose a class of protocols that limit the performance gain from selfish manipulation while incurring only a small efficiency loss. The proposed protocols are based on the idea of a review strategy, with which nodes collect signals about the actions of other nodes over a period of time, use a statistical test to infer whether or not other nodes are following the prescribed behavior, and trigger a punishment if a deviation is inferred. We consider the cases of private and public signals and provide analytical and numerical results to demonstrate the properties of the proposed protocols.