The Risks of WiFi Flexibility: Enabling and Detecting Cheating

Abstract

Flexibility is an important paradigm for future WiFi networks. However, it also opens the possibility for diverse methods of cheating, which users can perform to increase their throughput. Therefore, it is important to develop the necessary tools to mitigate such efforts. In this paper we first discuss the risks of flexibility in terms of misbehaviour. We then propose an architecture to detect misbehaviour and react by punishing the cheaters. The proposed architecture utilizes advanced passive monitoring, flexible WiFi software, and appropriate reasoning to detect cheating. We validate its performance and discuss means of punishment