On the Impact of Backoff Misbehaving Nodes in IEEE 802.11 Networks

In this paper, we address the problem of quantifying the impact of backoff misbehaving nodes in IEEE 802.11 networks. We propose two performance metrics, throughput gain ratio and throughput degradation ratio to quantify the performance gain of misbehaving nodes over legitimate nodes and the performance loss of legitimate nodes due to backoff misbehavior, respectively. We use asymptotic analysis to derive both throughput gain ratio and throughput degradation ratio in an IEEE 802.11 network in the presence of multiple misbehaving nodes. We show that, in general, the throughput gain ratio increases linearly with the number of legitimate nodes, and the throughput degradation ratio increases linearly with the number of misbehaving nodes. Finally, we use ns-2 simulations to validate our analytical results.