IMPACT ANALYSIS OF BLACK HOLE ATTACKS ON MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS PERFORMANCE

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of mobile stations with wireless interfaces which form a temporary network without using any central administration. MANETs are more vulnerable to attacks because they have some specific characteristics as complexity of wireless communication and lack of infrastructure. Hence security is an important requirement in mobile ad hoc networks. One of the attacks against network integrity in MANETs is the Black Hole Attack. In this type of attack all data packets are absorbed by malicious node, hence data loss occurs. In this paper we investigated the impacts of Black Hole attacks on the network performance. We have simulated black hole attacks using Network Simulator 2 (NS-2) and have measured the packet loss in the network without and with a black hole attacks. Also, we measured the packet loss when the number of black hole attacks increases