Effects of Black Hole Attack on MANET Using Reactive and Proactive Protocols

Wireless networks are gaining popularity to its peak in the present era and therefore appealing the users for wireless connectivity irrespective of their geographic position. There is an increasing threat of attacks on the Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET). Black hole attack is one of the security threat in which the traffic is redirected to such a node that actually does not exist in the network. The scope of this paper is to study the effects of Black hole attack in MANET using both Proactive routing protocol (i.e. Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) and Reactive routing protocol Ad-Hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV)). Comparative analysis of Black Hole attack for both protocols is taken into consideration. The impact of Black Hole attack on the performance of MANET is evaluated exploring which protocol is more vulnerable to the attack and it was found that AODV is 10% more vulnerable to Black Hole attack as compared to OLSR. The measurements were taken in the light of throughput, end-to-end delay and network load. Simulation is done in Optimized Network Engineering Tool (OPNET).