A Study of Black Hole Attack on MANET Performance

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a self-organized wireless network, consisting of nodes (mobile devices) responsible for its creation, operation and maintenance. The communication in the MANET is of multihop in nature due to absence of any fixed infrastructure. An attacker may intrude easily into MANET by posing as legitimate intermediate node and present various types of security attacks on data exchanges taking place between source and destination. In this paper we study the impact of presence of black hole node on MANET performance on the basis of reachability, hop count, neighbor node density and path optimality. We observe that as the percentage of black hole nodes increases, the MANET performance degrades significantly.