A Media Access Control Protocol for Wireless Adhoc Networks with Misbehaviour Avoidance

Abstract

The most common wireless Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is IEEE 802.11. Currently IEEE 802.11 standard protocol is not resilient for many identified MAC layer attacks, because the protocol is designed without intention for providing security and with the assumption that all the nodes in the wireless network adhere to the protocol. However, nodes may purposefully show misbehaviours at the MAC layer in order to obtain extra bandwidth con-serve resources and degrade or disrupt the network performance. This research proposes a secure MAC protocol for MAC layer which has integrated with a novel misbehaviour detection and avoidance mechanism for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). The proposed secure MAC protocol the sender and receiver work collaboratively together to handshakes prior to deciding the back-off values. Common neighbours of the sender and receiver contributes effectively to misbehaviours detection and avoidance process at MAC layer. In addition the proposed solution introduces a new trust distribution model in the network by assuming none of the wireless nodes need to trust each other. The secure MAC protocol also assumes that misbehaving nodes have significant levels of intelligence to avoid the detection