Performance Analysis of Mobile Ad-Hoc Network Protocols Against Black Hole Attacks

Abstract

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks also named as MANETs became one of the most preferred wireless networks due to their dynamic nature and their deployment simplicity. Despite of routing protocols, the nature of such networks increased threat of attacks while the MANETs must have a secure way for transmission and communication which is quite challenging and vital issue. One of such popular and effective attacks is the black hole attack. In this attack, a malicious node advertises itself as having freshest or shortest path to specific node and the traffic is redirected to such a node that actually does not exist in the network. In this paper a study of the impact of Black hole attack on the performance of Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) is discussed. This study is based on performing a comparative analysis of Black hole attack in MANET using both Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) and Ad-Hoc on Demand Distance Vector (AODV) to find out which protocol is more vulnerable to the attack and to what extent is the impact of the attack on both protocols. The performance analysis is evaluated with respect to throughput, end-to-end delay and network load using OPNET modeller simulator. Simulation results based on using 50 nodes showed that AODV experienced a higher delay than OLSR meanwhile the throughput of OLSR can be observed as being higher compared to that of AODV (namely, throughput of OLSR is approximately 1133333 bits/sec on average and in AODV it is about 1600bits/sec in presence of two malicious nodes) and OLSR network load is higher when compared to AODV.