Ant Based Black Hole Detection and Prevention in MANET

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) consists of a set of mobile hosts that carry out basic networking functions like routing, packet forwarding and service discovery without the help of an established infrastructure. The nodes of an ad hoc network rely on one another in forwarding a packet to its destination; due to the limited range of each mobile host's wireless transmissions. Security in MANET is an essential component for basic network functions like packet forwarding and routing: network operation can be easily jeopardized if countermeasures are not embedded into basic network functions at the early stages of their design. In MANET, Black hole attacks may cause packet dropping, misrouting the information form source to destination. So the performance of the network is totally degraded. The biology-inspired techniques like as ant colony optimization (ACO) which have proven to be very adaptable in other problem domains have been applied to the MANET routing problem as it forms a good fit to the problem.