Performance Analysis of AODV under Black Hole Attack through Use of OPNET Simulator Project

Project background 

Ad hoc networks are self organized; self operated and self configured and they can operate without any special infrastructure requirements. In general ad hoc networks can be of different types like mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks and wireless mesh networks. These entire networks operated under the basic principles of ad hoc networks and operate independently without any special configuration and infrastructure requirements.

There are different types of routing protocols across that the ad hoc networks like MANETs that can be used for the routing process across the network and they can be categorized in to three important aspects like proactive routing protocols, reactive routing protocols and hybrid routing protocols. Proactive routing protocols are table driven routing protocols, which operated under the guidance of the routing tables and in general they are static nature and the routing is fixed across the network and can’t handle the dynamic topology or configuration changes.

Reactive routing protocols are on demand routing protocols and they are dynamic in nature and can handle the topology and configuration changes easily across the network. Hybrid routing protocols holds both the features of proactive and reactive routing protocols and can behave either of the ways based on the conditions of the ad hoc network to accomplish the routing task.  Among these routing protocols, reactive or on demand routing protocols are widely used across the MANETs as they are dynamic in nature and can take the independent routing decisions based on the topology changes and among the on demand routing protocols Ad hoc on demand vector (AODV) is most frequently used routing protocol. 

There are different performance metrics that can be considered with respect to the functionality of the AODV and the most important among them is the working nature of the protocol under various attacks across MANETs. In general there are different types of attacks on MANETs and they can be classified in to two important types like passive attacks and active attacks. Passive attacks target to steal the networking information and active attacks are similar to worm attacks, where they replicate or duplicate the data being exchanged.

Among the most common active network layer attacks black hole attacks are malicious in nature and they can propagate in to the network and damage the MANETs routing information by sending virtual and arbitrary requests to the destinations. Across the black hole attack, the malicious nodes and sends a fresh route requests to the destinations and thus the destinations drops the actual data without forwarding them. Black hole attack across the AODV can be classified in to two important types like black hole attack by RREQ and black hole attack by RREP. The main aim of this project is to evaluate the performance of AODV under the black hole attack and the detailed description of the aims and objective is as given below 

Aim:  To evaluate the performance of AODV under black hole attack using OPNET simulation.

Objectives 

Following are the research objectives 

  • To critically review the ad hoc networks and the corresponding routing protocols
  • To analyze different types of attacks on ad hoc networks like MANETS
  • To design OPNET simulation scenarios to evaluate the performance of AODV under the black hole attacks
  • To develop the designed scenarios using OPNET simulation tool
  • To evaluate the simulation scenarios and compare the scenarios under different attacks of black hole
  • To test the simulation results and evaluate the performance of AODV under different attacks.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *