Title: Resilient P2P anonymous routing by using redundancy

Authors: Yingwu Zhu

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Seattle University, 901 12th Ave., P.O. Box 222000, Seattle, WA 98122, USA

Abstract: One hurdle to using peer-to-peer (P2P) networks as anonymising networks is churn. Node churn makes anonymous paths fragile and short-lived: failures of a relay node disrupt the path, resulting in message loss and communication failures. To make anonymous routing resilient to node failures, we take two steps: 1) we use a simple yet powerful idea based on message redundancy by erasure coding and path redundancy to mask node failures; 2) we base mix choices of a path on node lifetime prediction and choose stable nodes as relay nodes, thereby prolonging single path durability. We present an allocation of erasure-coded message segments among multiple paths that provides a guideline on how to maximise routing resilience upon different node availabilities in real-world systems. Via detailed simulations, we compare routing resilience of our approach and existing anonymity protocols, showing that our approach greatly improves routing resilience while consuming modest bandwidth.

Keywords: peer-to-peer; P2P networks; anonymous routing; node churn; node failures; node lifetime prediction; message redundancy; erasure coding; path redundancy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPCN.2010.037793

International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking, 2010 Vol.6 No.3/4, pp.197 - 207

Published online: 30 Dec 2010 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article