BRAVO: A black-hole resilient ad-hoc on demand distance Vector rOuting for tactical communications

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) are widely used in tactical scenarios because they can be deployed rapidly in hostile areas and the distributed nature of their operations makes them robust to nodes failures. However, distributed control involves new vulnerabilities that might be critical in electronic warfare scenarios. In this paper we focus on black hole attacks which introduce in the network fake routing information. On the consequence of the above information, the malicious node enters in the end-to-end path of most communication sessions and discards all received packets. In this paper a solution, named BRAVO is proposed, that exploits a mechanism based on credits allowing nodes to estimate the trustworthiness of neighboring nodes. Simulation results demonstrate that in most scenarios BRAVO is robust to black hole attacks.