Incentive Compatible Medium Access Control in Wireless Networks

The current IEEE 802.11 medium access control standard is being deployed in coffee shops, in airports and even across major cities. The terminals accessing these wi-fi access points do not belong to the same entity, as in corporate networks,but are usually individually owned and operated. Entities sharing these network resources have no incentive in following protocol rules other than to optimize their overall utility, usually a function of throughput and delay. We briefly discuss shortfalls of the current IEEE 802.11 standard in environments where terminals are competing for a common bandwidth resource, and then we introduce a new MAC protocol designed with the above considerations. Thus the new Incentive Compatible MAC (ICMAC) protocol is more suited for these open environments, without compromising the overall network performance.