An efficient approach to circumvent black hole nodes in manets

MANETs are self-configured network. Nodes in Manets need not follow a specific infrastructure. Nodes are connected wirelessly and so nodes can travel to any direction. Manets assure that all its nodes are cooperating with each other. Sometimes, some nodes may not be reliable. These unreliable intermediate nodes participate in the packet forwarding and drop the packets instead of forwarding them to the destination node. This type of security attack is called black hole attack (Baadache and Belmehdi in Int Comput Sci Inf Sec 7(1):1–10, 2010). In this paper, an efficient method of route discovery process is used which bypasses the black hole nodes and uses only the reliable route for transmission. The main advantage of using the proposed method is that there is no need to maintain black hole list. So, there is no need to check the black hole list each time during route discovery. Dynamic source routing (DSR) is used for the transmission of packets. The simulations are done to measure packet delivery ratio, packet drop, average throughput, normalized routing overhead and average end-to-end delay. Simulation results shows that the proposed method improves the packet delivery ratio in presence of black hole and reduces the packet drop. Also the communication overhead is reduced which in turn minimizes the resource utilization in Manets.