Performance analysis of exponential backoff
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Performance analysis of the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Automating cross-layer diagnosis of enterprise wireless networks
Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Active behavioral fingerprinting of wireless devices
WiSec '08 Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Wireless network security
Design and implementation of light-weight mobile multicast for fast MIPv6
Computer Communications
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Wireless LAN (WLAN) market consists of IEEE 802.11 MAC standard conformant devices (e.g., access points (APs), client adapters) from multiple vendors. Certain third party certifications such as those specified by the Wi-Fi alliance have been widely used by vendors to ensure basic conformance to the 802.11 standard, thus leading to the expectation that the available devices exhibit identical MAC level behavior. In this paper, however, we present what we believe to be the first ever set of experimental results that highlight the fact that WLAN devices from different vendors in the market can have heterogeneous MAC level behavior. Specifically, we demonstrate with examples and data that in certain cases, devices may not be conformant with the 802.11 standard while in other cases, they may differ in significant details that are not a part of mandatory specifications of the standard. We argue that heterogeneous MAC implementations can adversely impact WLAN operations leading to unfair bandwidth allocation, potential break-down of related MAC functionality and difficulties in provisioning the capacity of a WLAN. However, on the positive side, MAC level heterogeneity can be useful in applications such as vendor/model level device fingerprinting.