Modeling Data Transmission in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks for Characterizing Black-Hole Attacks

The vulnerability of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) to various kinds of attacks such as active route interfering and denial of service has brought increasing concerns in the deployment of MANETs. The black-hole Attack is a notorious attack that absorbs data packets by the malicious node and results in denial of service in the network. This paper proposes a Markov chain based stochastic model to simulate data transmission in MANETs using the RTS/CTS handshaking mechanism for characterizing the effect of black-hole attacks. Through simulation evaluation, we analyze the effect of black-hole attacks on major network performance metrics for the multi-hop routing protocol applying the proposed data transmission model.