Spatial Path Selection and Network Topology Optimisation in P2P Anonymous Routing Protocols

To anonymous internet traffic, many popular protocols route traffic through a network of nodes in order to conceal information about the request. However, routing traffic through other nodes inherently introduces added latency. Over the past two decades, there were many attempts to improve the path selection in order to decrease latency with little or no trade-off in terms of security, and anonymity. In this paper, we show the potential use of geo-sharding in decentralized routing networks to improve fault-tolerance, and latency. Such networks can be used as a communication layer for Edge devices computing huge amounts of data. Specifically, we focus our work on Low Latency Anonymous Routing Protocol (LLARP), a protocol built on top of Oxen blockchain that aims to achieve internet privacy. We analyse the existing network of Service Nodes(SN), observe cloud provider centralisation, and propose a high level protocol that provides incentives for a better geographical distribution mitigating potential cloud provider/country wide service dropouts. Additionally, the protocol level information about geographical location can be used to improve client's path (the string of nodes that will participate in the transaction) selection, decreasing network latency. We show the feasibility of our approach by comparing it with the random path selection in a simulated environment. We observe marginal drops in average latency when selecting paths geographically closer to each other.