A Security-Enabled Wireless Token Cluster MAC Protocol with Intelligent Token Policy

Most existing wireless MAC protocols are based on the assumption that all hosts cooperate with each other and are compliant to predefined rules, which is not always true in wireless network. Therefore, wireless MACs are often vulnerable to MAC misbehaviors from which selfish hosts could gain unfair channel access at the expense of others\´ performance by deviating from protocols. Recently, researches on MAC misbehaviors have drawn considerable attention. The detection of misbehaviors is quite challenging due to the intrinsic random feature of the contension-based wireless MAC design. Besides, the contention-based random access protocols cannot support bounded delay or guaranteed channel throughput, two important aspects of QoS. In this paper, we propose STC-MAC, a Seurity-enalbed Wireless Token Cluster MAC Protocol. Thus, the reserved channel access and bounded delay could be achieved with the help of the dynamic infrastructure. With an intelligent multi-token awarding policy, the proposed approach takes advantage of "space reuse" in wireless network to further improve the channel utilization. In addition, an effective detection and penalty scheme is designed to coutermeasure against possible selfish MAC misbehaviors.