Highlighting the effects of joint MAC layer misbehavior and virtual link attack in wireless ad hoc networks

In wireless ad hoc networks, employing the IEEE 802.11 technology, access to the wireless medium is scheduled according to the CSMA/CA protocol. This protocol was designed with the assumption that nodes would follow properly its operation and never deviate from it. However, it is common to have selfish nodes that may choose to disobey this protocol in order to either gain more bandwidth or degrade the network performance. In this paper we analyze and quantify the impact of each misbehaving technique on the network performance using extensive simulations. We emphasize on the propagation of MAC layer misbehavior effects to the higher layers, particularly to the routing layer, in a pure ad hoc environment.