  Wireless sensor networks are vulnerable to several attacks, one of them being
the black hole attack. A black hole is a malicious node that attracts all the
traffic in the network by advertising that it has the shortest path in the
network. Once it receives the packet from other nodes, it drops all the packets
causing loss of critical information. In this paper we propose a reliability
analysis mechanism. The proposed reliability analysis scheme overcomes the
shortcomings of existing cooperative black hole attack using AODV routing
protocol. As soon as there is a path available for routing, its reliability is
checked using the proposed scheme. The proposed reliability analysis scheme
helps in achieving maximum reliability by minimizing the complexity of the
system. The final path available after the reliability analysis using the
proposed scheme will make the path secure enough to minimize the packet loss,
end-to-end delay and the energy utilization of the network as well as maximize
the network lifetime in return.
