ARA MAC - A Qualifying Approach for improving Attack Resiliency and Adaptivity for Medium Access Control Protocol in WLAN 802. 11

The exponential growth of wireless network in recent years has brought some major research issues that include a fair share of the available bandwidth, quality of service (QoS) and control of misbehaving traffic nodes/sources. However, in wireless networks, including cellular, Ad Hoc, and sensor networks, that are based on a shared medium and often contention-oriented protocols, these issues have not been fully addressed. Most wireless networks are based on IEEE 802.11x standards which provide public wireless access to the Internet. The medium access control (MAC) in IEEE 802.11 uses a distributed contention resolution mechanism for sharing the channel. If the MAC protocol is manipulated or misused, then the consequences can be overwhelming, such as the disruption of the whole network. A selfish/cheater node [10] can manipulate the MAC protocol in different ways to gain access to the channel resulting in some cases of starvation of other nodes in the same network. The manipulation of the MAC layer protocol is hidden from the upper layers, and can be further enhanced if combined with more violations from these upper layers of the ISO/OSI Model.