A disconnection-aware mechanism to provide anonymity in two-level P2P systems

In this paper, a disconnection-aware mechanism to provide anonymity in two-level P2P systems is proposed. As usual, anonymity is obtained by means of connecting the source and destination peers through a set of intermediate nodes, creating a multiple-hop path. The main contribution of the paper is a distributed algorithm able to guarantee the anonymity even when a node in a path fails (voluntarily or not). The algorithm takes into account the inherent costs associated with multiple-hop communications and tries to reach a well-balanced solution between the anonymity degree and its associated costs. Some parameters are obtained analytically but the main network performances are evaluated by simulation. We also quantify the costs associated with the control packets used by the distributed recovery algorithm. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.