Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a group of mobile devices that can form a network, interconnect and share resources without the use of any fixed network infrastructure or centralised management. MANET is exposed to security attacks because of its fundamental characteristics such as open medium, dynamic topology and lack of central monitoring. The black hole attack is one example of the attacks MANET is exposed to. In black hole attack, a malicious node misleadingly claims to have an updated route to the destination node, absorbs and drops the packets that are supposed to be forwarded to the destination node. The common MANET reactive routing protocols are Ad-hoc on-demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR). These protocols are easily attacked by the black hole during the route discovery process. This research therefore studies black hole attack in detail and assesses the performance of AODVand DSR under black hole attack. The work is achieved by simulating the two protocols under regular operation and under black hole attack using Network Simulator 2 (NS-2). The protocols are analysed using packet delivery ratio, throughput and end-to-end delay as performance metrics. The research further compares the black hole attack solutions that have been previously proposed and determines the solution that performs better than others. The simulation results show that MANET under normal operating environment out performs MANET attacked by black hole, and that AODV is more vulnerable to black hole attack than DSR. The comparison study of the existing black hole attack solutions show that SAODV is the best effective black hole attack removal technique. But when considering the solution that brings no negative impact to the normal operation of the network, IDSAODV is the best solution.
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