A principal-agent method to prevent selfish MAC layer behavior in wireless networks

Security is a fundamental prerequisite for the survivability and reliability of wireless networks. In a network where limited wireless resources have to be shared, selfish nodes can manipulate relevant network parameters to gain more access to the resources, and hence obtain a higher performance than their fair share, while the performance of well-behaved nodes will be significantly degraded. This paper considers the environment of an IEEE802.11 WLAN, and proposes a solution from the prospective of a principal-agent system. Our solution uses an incentive and a constraint mechanism to encourage the selfish agent to perform normally. Our method does not modify the IEEE 802.11 protocol, but requires an additional principal node only. Simulation results show that our method can overcome the influence of selfish nodes improve the network fairness performance while maintaining the throughput performance.