An Anonymous Overlay Routing Protocol for Uplink-Intensive Applications

Abstract: Sender anonymity in network communication is an important problem, widely addressed in the literature. Mixnets, combined with onion routing, represent certainly the most concrete and effective approach achieving the above goal. In general, the drawback of these approaches is that anonymity has a price in terms of traffic overhead and latency. On the Internet, to achieve scalability and not to require relevant infrastructure and network-protocol changes, only P2P overlay protocols can be adopted. Among these, the most representative proposal is certainly Tarzan, which is designed to obtain strong anonymity still preserving low-latency applications. In recent years, we are witnessing a change in Internet traffic. Due to IoT, cloud storage, WSN, M2M, uplink traffic is more and more increasing. An interesting question is whether this new traffic configuration may enable new strategies to improve the effectiveness of Tarzan-like approaches. In this paper, we investigate this problem, by proposing \textit{C-Tarzan}, an anonymous overlay P2P routing protocol. Through a deep experimental analysis, we show that C-Tarzan outperforms Tarzan in the case of uplink-intensive applications.