Punishment protocol for backoff manipulation in MAC IEEE 802.11

Wireless network is now everywhere, therefore, competing for access to wireless channel is becoming an important issue. The IEEE 802.11 wireless standard [1] requires nodes contending for channel access to wait for a "backoff" interval, randomly selected from a specified range, before initiating a transmission. However, today's wireless network adapter provides users with possibility to configure protocol parameter hence CSMA/CA access method may not work properly. Selfish users may disobey the rules by choosing smaller backoff value resulting in unfair throughput advantage. Although, there is a correction protocol proposed but it comes with the new MAC protocol [5]. This new protocol is incompatible with the original standard and thus infeasible to be deployed. In this paper, we present a new punishment protocol which can be incrementally applied to any wireless access point. In addition, it can be used with any detection scheme without any change in an original MAC protocol.